


Duplicity

by AleccioByas, Scrunchles



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Betrayal, Blood and Gore, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fanart, Friends to Enemies, Gen, I'm Sorry, M/M, Original Character Death(s), Slow Burn, Unstoppable Force, all the original characters are side/plot pushing characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2018-01-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 00:33:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 47,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7486287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AleccioByas/pseuds/AleccioByas, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scrunchles/pseuds/Scrunchles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mako Rutledge was supposed to have died years ago.  He left Roadhog, a man fueled by bloodlust and destruction, behind to weather post-apocalyptic Oz in his place.</p><p>Roadhog had been traveling with Junkrat for a year.  Remnants of his past, of a man he had decided was dead, kept coming back: feelings, emotions, actions that he no longer thought himself capable.  He knew that this was bad, but it didn’t feel wrong.  It was then that he realized that Junkrat was bad for Roadhog.  </p><p>Good for Mako, in a way he didn’t even want to consider, but bad for Roadhog.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A month ago, Alecciobyas approached me about a collaboration with a plot line in mind. We were both expecting like a one shot, but no. Nothing is that simple.
> 
> I'm writing the bulk of the fic and she is editing, assisting in plot and doing the art.
> 
> Special thanks to Lightspeed for the beta work.

It was always easy to tell when a Junker had been hired by suits. They’d still be dressed in whatever kind of bullshit clothes they could scavenge or piece together. They ate enough, but they didn’t eat right, and it was easily reflected in how their flesh clung to parts of them and bulged out in others. Dust that had taken years to accumulate would be scrubbed from fingernails and crevices, and their hair looked like it had been combed properly sometime within the past week. Suits did love their pets well-groomed.

Or, as well-groomed as it was possible for a junker to be, anyways.

The semi-clean woman in question approached him with her hands already raised and a piece of paper clutched between two prosthetic fingers that were clearly new. The smell of soap cut through the sour musk of the other Junkers, accompanying the tang of fresh motor oil that didn’t carry the acrid stench of having been used over and over again. It gave her away immediately as a junker who’d sold herself to suits. She had scars arcing down the left side of her face, giving her a permanent sneer on one side, and she’d shaved the left side of her hair away to show the remainder of the scars where they would have otherwise disappeared into her hairline. Her shiny prosthetic, still mostly clean of the dirt and oil and God knew what else, stopped just above her bicep. Roadhog was almost impressed that she hadn’t managed to bleed out. It would’ve been a lot more probable for her to have died, as opposed to Junkrat’s, which stopped only a few inches above the elbow. 

“Not here to fight,” she assured him.

Roadhog snorted behind his mask, not bothering to look up as he played with his still-full drink. “You’d be stupid to try,” he told her. “Go away. I don’t deal with suits’ pets.”

  
  


“It’s not you they want,” the woman told him. She ignored his command to leave, and slipped up to sit on the barstool next to where he stood. “They just want the kid.”

In one swift motion, Roadhog’s hand was wrapped all the way around the woman’s shiny new prosthetic, his thumb and middle finger overlapping at the curve of her forearm. He stared down at the woman through the dark, near-opaque lenses set into his mask. She paled slightly, but, to her credit, didn’t jerk away. Instead, she carefully slid the piece of paper closer to Roadhog and nodded down at it.

“There’s an address, time, and the amount you’ll be paid,” she told him, her voice pitched too deep to be steady. “You hand us the ankle-biter and we give you the cash. Simple as that.”

_“Simple as that,” Junkrat had cackled, sloshing Junker moonshine onto Roadhog’s boots.  “One minute, I was sitting in mum’s lap, then next thing I know, I was forcing my skinny ass into some deep dark crevice of that hunk of shit Omnium.  Spent fuckin’ years hauling out the motherload of alloys and parts and shit.  Fuck, wish I’d had the sense to pocket some of it.  Choice scrap, it was,” he lamented as he took a pull from their shared bottle._

_Rage, cruel and hot and unexpected, flooded Roadhog’s chest.  It was the kind of anger that had finally put Mako Rutledge to sleep, but that had been for a different cause.  That had been personal—for him, for his family and friends.  This was for Junkrat._

_“They sold you?” he asked, ignoring the booze seeping through the laces of his left boot, cool from the dry wind._

_Junkrat winced at the burn of the alcohol and nodded.  He handed the bottle back to Roadhog and took a hissing breath._

_“I get it.  I mean… another mouth to feed ‘n’ all.”  He waved his hand dismissively.  “How ‘bout you, mate?  What’s your damage?”_

_Roadhog heard the bottle crack in his hand before he felt it. Junkrat squawked and snatched the bottle back before any of the precious booze began to leak out._

_“Right, okay!  Get it, ‘m sorry I asked,” Junkrat muttered._

_Roadhog stared wordlessly at the wall across from him, trying to imagine his charge—shorter, ganglier, and somehow even more excitable, being traded for a bag full of cash, drugs, booze or whatever the hell was precious enough that his parents had just given him up like that._

_It made him angrier.  The fire within burned even hotter, so much so that he wanted to break everything within a fifty kilometer radius. This was bad, but it didn’t feel wrong.  It was then that he realized that Junkrat was bad for Roadhog._

_Good for Mako, in a way he didn’t even want to consider, but bad for Roadhog._

Roadhog stared the woman down for an entire minute, knots coiling in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to refuse. His first instinct was to crush her prosthetic like a tin can and tell her there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in this irradiated hellscape of him giving up Junkrat.

It wasn’t just so some lowlife scavs would be kept from making a bundle by doing dirty work for the suits. It wasn’t the grudge any Junker worth his salt still held against those who had told them to bite it for “the greater good” during the crisis. It was because Junkrat’s voice was calling to him across the bar and the bones in his neck cracked with the speed at which he whipped his head around. It was because his instincts were screaming at him to make sure Junkrat was  _okay_.

The Rat in question was currently being held down with his left arm twisted up behind him by a brawny one-eyed Junker. A knife was stuck in the table only a few inches from where Junkrat’s face was pressed, though it didn’t seem like it was putting him off. He just grinned when he saw that he’d gotten Roadhog’s attention, and that his assailant had become aware of Roadhog. He jabbed a metal finger up at the man holding him down. “Come arm wrestle this bloke, Hoggy!” he called.

Roadhog felt a smile tug at his lips as Junkrat was immediately released. He had to bite down a chuckle that teetered on affection when Junkrat scooped up the betting pool and blew a raspberry at the bogan that had been twisting his arm.

Roadhog finally let the woman go, and she acted casual, like she hadn’t just had a vice about to crush her new arm.

“Just make sure he doesn’t bring the place down on our heads, yeah?” she told him before she slipped into the crowd as Junkrat waded back over to Roadhog with the stack of bills in his hand.

“Drinks’re on me, mate!” Junkrat crowed as he slapped down a tenner before grabbing Roadhog’s still untouched drink to take a gulp. “Who’s the sheila?” he asked as he set down the over-warm, piss-colored lager and began to count through the stack of bills in his hand. He counted it twice, then carefully counted out half to smack onto the bar in front of Roadhog.

“Thought she wanted to get to know me,” Roadhog told him gruffly as he thumbed through the stack of bills on the bar.  He shuffled the slip of paper in with his pinky before he folded the entire wad into his pocket.

Junkrat laughed halfway through draining the rest of Hog’s drink, sloshing the so-called beer down his chin and onto his chest and stomach. “Way to blow it then, mate,” he said as he socked Roadhog’s arm companionably. He tipped back the dregs of the beer with a grimace. 

“Shit’s piss,” he commented as the bartender set two more down in front of them and took Junkrat’s bill in exchange, slipping it into his pocket. Junkrat grinned, shrugged, and grabbed one of the “fresh” glasses with an upbeat hum.

Roadhog finally allowed himself to unbuckle his mask enough to be able to drink his beer and listened as Junkrat prattled on and on about how he was going to taste an  _actual_  Belgian lager someday.

Junkrat kept talking, and Roadhog let him, and eventually the familiarity of the younger man’s voice allowed the uncomfortable knots in Roadhog’s gut to loosen.

This wasn’t going to work, Junkrat had to go.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You knew this was coming so you can't be mad at us.

Disarming Junkrat was going to be difficult. Even if Roadhog could get him to leave his usual weapons, there was no way he wouldn’t ferret away a few cherry bombs.  The cherries could be just as bad as his frag grenades, depending on the mix—and then there was his harness. Roadhog had no idea how powerful the bombs strapped to Junkrat were.  He’d asked him once, and Junkrat had told him that if he ever died, Roadhog would find out. Whatever the fuck that meant.

Roadhog had to be smart. He had to keep Junkrat’s trust.

He finally settled on letting Junkrat stay armed, but taking most of the teeth out of him.  He quietly removed the flint from Junkrat’s grenade launcher and the spring from the recoil starter on his Rip-tire the night before the drop-off date with the Junkers. 

The morning of the meet up, Junkrat began checking over all his gear. Before, Roadhog would have approved, but right now, he needed to avoid Junkrat finding his sabotage.

Fortunately, Junkrat was distractible. It had always been a pain in the ass before, but now it was exceedingly useful. By the time Junkrat realized he didn’t have any attack power, he’d already be turned over to good hands. Well, maybe not _good_ hands.

As his boss leaned over his grenade launcher, Roadhog’s stomach turned uncomfortably and he cleared his throat. “Rat,” he grunted to his gangly partner, “come help w’the chopper a mo’.”

Immediately, Junkrat perked up and his launcher clattered to the concrete floor of the little burned out garage they were using as a base. Roadhog rarely let Junkrat anywhere near the mechanics of his precious ride, so when he was having trouble with her and needed a fresh set of eyes, Junkrat was quick and more than eager to help. 

Roadhog let Junkrat prattle on to him about motorcycles while he looked the chopper over. Rat braced himself on the gas tank with his mechanical right hand, his left skimming through the parts underneath, looking for any missing bits and bobs. He went over everything carefully before finally straightening up with a grin. 

“Fuck if I know, mate,” he said, instead flipping the fuel switch and hopping on. Roadhog was never entirely sure how Junkrat managed to stay upright while kick starting the motorcycle with his prosthetic leg, but he managed, and the bike roared to life without a hitch. 

Roadhog shrugged. “Guess she’s just touchy today,” he conceded, checking the sun. “Grab your shit and let’s go. We’ve got somewhere to be.”

Junkrat hopped off the bike, grin still in place. He left the bike running as he moved back into the garage with his unbalanced gait. “Where we goin’?” he called, coming back only a moment later with his tire hoisted back into its usual spot, and his grenade launcher tucked into the crook of his arm. 

Roadhog was already seated on the bike when he came back, frowning as he wiped a bit of grease and oil from the handlebar where Junkrat had been touching it. He turned to look at the kid still standing in the door of the garage, a smear of engine grease going from his jaw up to his cheekbone from working on the bike. 

“It’s a surprise,” Roadhog told him, revving the engine pointedly. 

Junkrat grinned and scampered out to hop into the side car.

It wasn’t until they were halfway through the drive with Junkrat prattling on about some sort of upgrade he had planned for his prosthetic arm that the tightness disappeared from Roadhog’s stomach. It was probably just some bad rations.  Who knew when the crap they were eating had expired.

When they arrived at the sturdy steel and omnic-alloy building, Junkrat started to get antsy. “The fuck we doin’ all the way out here?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at their surroundings.  It was the closest they had been to the Omnium in the year since Roadhog had started working for Junkrat.

“Quiet.” Roadhog raised a finger to his mask.  The lie felt oily as it slipped right off his tongue. “It’s a drop off point for Kangaboom,” he said.

Junkrat’s face lit up at that. “Hope he shows up in the middle of it all,” he said loudly. “I wanna blow his own shit up right in front a’ his face!” Junkrat’s cackle was bordering on giggling as Roadhog “broke” the unlocked chain from the door, opening it up.

He entered first, under the guise of clearing the place and shuffled around for a moment before he said, “ ‘s good.” Shadows shifted in the west corner.

Junkrat strolled in behind him, eager to take stock of the arms Kangaboom was likely to move. It’s what had made the lie so enticing to Junkrat— Kangaboom dealt in old stock, meaning a lot of useful scrap and old parts for the taking. He finally paused when all he saw was empty floor space and heavy darkness. 

As Roadhog’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw the veritable army of around a dozen junkers who’d come to collect Rat. Among them was the woman who had left him the slip of paper.

Junkrat’s eyes adjusted just as quickly, and he backed up a couple paces until he felt Roadhog’s sturdy stomach against his back. “Well,” he said, and Hog could hear the confident grin in his voice. “This sure ain’t a Kangaboom cache but I’m sure they’ve got something valuable between ‘em, ‘ey, Hoggy?”

Roadhog felt that tightness again and grunted. His scrap gun shifted in his hand, the nuts, bolts and nails inside clattering from one side of the chamber to the other. 

That noise was enough to embolden Junkrat, and he began his charge forward with a maniac’s cackle, shooting unlit frag grenades at the enemy. Roadhog stayed where he was, impassive behind his mask. When the grenades failed to go off, Junkrat slid to a halt on the slick concrete floor and began backpedalling while checking his equipment all at once. 

Roadhog stepped forward to meet him, and reached around with one hand to yank the frag launcher out of Junkrat’s grip when he bumped against Roadhog’s gut again.

“Hog—“ Junkrat was mid-turn when Roadhog let the launcher clatter to the ground and then closed his hand over the tire on Junkrat’s back, hauling him halfway into the air. “Fuck,” Junkrat hissed at the sound of a switchblade, and Hog paid him no attention as he hacked through the straps of the harness that held both Junkrat’s mysterious bombs and his Rip-tire. With every movement he made, more epithets left Junkrat’s mouth until the straps were severed and he was back on the ground.

As soon as he hit the concrete, Junkrat whirled around. Roadhog had expected this, expected him to lash out in a desperate attack. So he raised his scrap gun, leveling it with Junkrat’s thin, grease-smeared face.

Junkrat just stared at him, past the gun. 

 

 

Roadhog’s already tight stomach flipped. Reflex kicked in, and he did the only thing he could think of when fixed with Junkrat’s bright eyes. He drew his gun back and slammed the sharp metal handle into Junkrat’s temple, forcing him to turn away.

“Walk,” Roadhog growled through his mask.

Junkrat raised his flesh hand to wipe at the blood beginning to streak his hairline, turning obediently.  Then, all of a sudden, he dropped down to scoop up one of the bombs from his vest with his other hand.  He pressed a button on it and it began to beep as it sailed over his shoulder, right at Hog’s face.

Roadhog jerked back and pulled the trigger on his scrap gun, diving out of the way as the thing exploded above him.  It was strong enough to make the rafters creak. He grunted as his shoulder hit the hard concrete and little bits of shrapnel showered down on him.

Two more similar explosions went off, followed in rapid succession by several smaller ones that sounded suspiciously like the unlit grenades that Junkrat had fired off earlier, lit from the hot refuse of the pipe bombs. Through the dust and smoke, Roadhog saw Junkrat streak past him for the door with three hulking Junkers hot on his heels. Hog could have easily nabbed him, but he felt like his job was done.

He stood and looked around. There were a few more dead Junkers than he’d expected.  Shit happens.

The woman he’d met before looked furious as she approached him with a visibly heavy duffle bag. “Our agreement was to bring him here _unarmed_ ,” she snapped.

Roadhog heard one of her goons get a good hit off of Junkrat, but the next sound he heard was a familiar yowl from his (former) charge, followed by a particularly unmanly squawk from one of the Junkers.

“This is as close as he gets to unarmed,” Roadhog grunted at her with a shrug. He didn’t turn to watch the struggle behind him— he didn’t have to. He knew that Junkrat was giving as good as he got and more. He tamped down that little swell of pride he got every time the kid beat the odds and showed off the side of him that defied the boundaries of his limbs, his gawkiness, and his muscle mass.  The kid had _guts_.

Junkrat bounded toward the other end of the room, managing to slip through the Junkers as they ran after him. Roadhog still didn’t bother looking, just held out his hand for his money.

“Help us catch him,” the woman demanded, jerking the bag away from Hog’s waiting hand. “Before he kills any more of my men.”

Roadhog narrowed his eyes and leaned down the easy foot and a half of height difference required for him to be snout to face with her. “My job was delivery, not wrangling. If you can’t manage the package, that’s not my problem.” He pressed the sharp tip of his scrap gun’s sight against her cheek, tracing one of the scars that sliced through her sallow skin. “Give me my money, and you can keep your head,” he offered.

The woman paled and the bag of money hit the ground.

Roadhog holstered his gun and knelt to double check that it was all there. More zeros than he had seen in either of his lives so far. He made sure to tune out the spitting and cussing of Junkrat, who had finally been caught, as he counted the bills.

“Nice doing business with you,” he told the woman as he zipped up the bag and stood.

“Go fuck youself,” she told him stiffly, turning around to take stock of her injured and dead. Roadhog just laughed and hoisted the duffle bag up onto his shoulder, the weight of it a heavy comfort. He didn’t look back as he ambled out the door. He didn’t need to—Junkrat wasn’t his problem anymore.

He tossed the bag of money into the sidecar that Junkrat had managed to fashion from scrap, held together with little more than spit and a prayer, and kicked the bike to life. The ancient engine roared beneath him, and he turned to put the sun at his back, riding east.

East to Sydney.

East to his new life.


	3. Chapter 3

The ride to Sydney was uneventful. Quiet. Perfect.

There was no one standing up in the side car and lobbing grenades at the welded, hulking scrap-heaps that most Junkers preferred for transportation. Roadhog didn’t have to stop and engage in a two-on-five fight every two hundred kilometers. He didn’t have to constantly lean over and yank Junkrat back down into the sidecar to prevent him from falling out when the bike jolted over the cratered roads. There were no prodding fingers, none of Junkrat yelling at him and trying to talk over the rush of the wind muffling his words.

When Roadhog finally got a motel for the night, he didn’t have to worry about needing two sleeping surfaces, and didn’t have to threaten anyone’s life for the bed. 

But it was too _quiet_.

His skin practically itched with the quiet, and he ended up pacing rather than resting for his trip like he’d planned. There was a lot to get done in two days, and he was going to be able to do it because he didn’t have anyone there to slow him down anymore.

Eventually, Roadhog quit pacing his empty motel room and sat down to make plans. He took the cheap hotel pad, and spun the monogrammed pen on his knuckle, the same way Junkrat—

Blue ink spilled over his hand as the pen snapped in half.

Maybe he just needed a shower.

Half an hour later, when Roadhog exited the bathroom with a towel around his waist and another draped over his head, he almost rumbled, “done,” to the empty room before realizing he was still,  _blissfully,_ alone.

Roadhog grunted and drug the towel on his head down to scrub his face, hopefully scrub away whatever made him forget he’d ditched the rat.  He tosses the towel over his shoulder before sitting down heavily and letting out a sigh. He felt like a complete mess. He felt like more of a mess than when he was chasing after Junkrat and trying to keep the damned fool from killing himself. It was the kind of mess that came with discovering emotions he’d convinced himself he was no longer capable of feeling.

 

Roadhog didn’t  _worry._ He didn’t  _care._ He didn’t deal with the kind of bullshit that came with feelings, and definitely didn’t form relationships based on those feelings. _Any_ feelings. He was a one man apocalypse.   _The_ one man apocalypse responsible for wreaking havoc on so many people that folks he’d never come across knew who we was and therefore knew enough not to mess with him.

And this apocalypse was sitting naked in a motel room, thinking about how the room was too  _empty_ and too  _quiet_ and there was too much _missing_ without a 22-year-old ticking time bomb to keep things interesting. 

Roadhog stood to get dressed. He needed to get out, he needed to move and walk around.  He was counting on that forward movement to provide him with the clarity he was looking for.

Since when had he needed any fucking  _clarity?_

Three stacks of cash went with him, loaded onto five separate prepaid cards at five different locations around the city. The light rail he decided to take was a disgusting misuse of funds, but everything he’d seen so far in Sydney fell into that category. On the bright side, he was physically imposing enough that no one stopped him about needing a shirt to enter a building.

The sun was setting when Roadhog thought he had finally mentally circled all the way back to his preferred state of mind: a little numb, a little angry, and very, very done with the world. And now, he was also hungry.

Sydney at least had restaurants that decided to take out all human interaction from ordering food. Roadhog stopped by a restaurant that was nothing more than a massive, glorified vending machine with seating options and waiters that just refilled drinks and left you alone.

He ordered water, no ice, and sat down to tap at the holo-projected table top that let him browse the food options in all their backlit, oversaturated glory. He flipped through the entire menu before it looped back to the beginning again, and ordered based on the displayed nutritional levels of the food. The more he ordered, the more he realized he wasn’t ordering for himself. Massive amounts of protein and complex carbohydrates, vegetables loaded with Vitamin D—

Roadhog sat and stared at the list of food until his water came. He drank the thing like he would a shot. The cup was so tiny in his massive hand that the drink disappeared down his throat in a single swallow. Appetite gone, he stood and left without a word.

The rest of his excursion led to a brief run-in with the local police, who seemed surprisingly willing to leave him be when he pointedly said he wasn’t making trouble,  _yet._

By the time he made it back to his room, he had a freighter ticket to India, a passport forged for speed rather than to conceal his identity, a bottle of booze that  _hadn’t_ been fermented in a propane tank, and enough Anzac wafers to last him the two week trip.

He felt exhausted. 

The itch had returned. The bone-deep restless shifting that kept telling him something was missing and wrong.

He couldn’t sleep. It was just too quiet.

Roadhog rolled off the mattress with a soft grunt and walked over to turn the air conditioning unit’s fan to the highest setting. Halfway back to the bed, he noticed the ink-stained notepad on the bedside table. The hum of the fan was better than nothing, but it didn’t quite soothe him and he could do one better.

Roadhog grabbed the notepad and pulled off a page that wasn’t soaked with ink. He used the tacky backside, sticking it to the unit at the right angle so it flapped in the wind, a fluttering noise just loud enough to feel like he’d done something useful.

Once he returned to the bed, Roadhog felt the fluttering paper dim the crawling, nagging feeling slightly. He tried to relax, shifting, and rolled onto his back to let his arm fall off the bed to dangle at his side. His fingers played with the wood frame the box spring was set on. He dragged his nail along the rough texture and tapped his thick fingertips against the surface in some sort of rhythm.

Slowly, Roadhog finally drifted off to sleep.

An hour and a half later, he shot upright, dazed and wondering where Junkrat was because it was too damn quiet again. It took him a moment, and then he groaned and flopped back on the bed, making it creak and groan beneath him.

He wasn’t going to lose sleep over that damn twerp. He wasn’t awake and miserable because of emotions, or missing the familiarity of having Junkrat with him. He was awake and miserable because the little shit didn’t know how to shut up, didn’t know how to sit still, and the piece of paper he’d stuck to the vent was lying on the floor.

Roadhog growled in frustration and reached for his weapons, taking them from where he’d staged them beside the bed. Maybe he could just convince himself that he was worried about being unarmed in a new environment. The chain of his hook made a soft clinking noise as he shifted the scrap gun to a more convenient position.

Maybe he should pull his hook up too, just in case someone busted through the door. Truth be told, it wasn’t as much of a concern anymore, now that he didn’t have a moving target always at his side. Roadhog pulled the hook up anyways. Anything to get back to sleep and make his final preparations smoother the next day. Once he had settled again, the steel-wrapped reel of the chain hook weighed the mattress next to him and made things just a little more bearable.

Roadhog shifted again, and cleared his throat before reaching over just to double check that the catch was released in case he needed to throw the chain at a moment’s notice. The links shifted against each other again, and the noise made his nerves settle a little more. He held the handle of the wicked hook in one hand and the other fiddled with the chain, soothing himself with the soft clinking.

_“Fucking stop that shit already,” Roadhog had snapped, when Junkrat just couldn’t give up toying with the chain of his bodyguard’s hook in the dead of night._

_“Yep, right, sure,” Junkrat had replied immediately. All was silent for a while, the kind of silence Roadhog was accustomed to sleeping to: the faint clicks of irradiated roaches the size of old-world mice and the howl of a radiation storm muffled by their brick walled cover._

_The clicking resumed just as Roadhog felt himself drifting off, and he threw a piece of rubble at Junkrat.  He heard a yelp as it shattered, and then silence.  He wondered if he’d brained the little fuck, but moments later, there was the almost imperceptible shift of metal on metal and Roadhog was storming over to  rip the weapon away from the other man._

_The next morning, Roadhog had been refreshed and Junkrat had looked ragged, with deeper bags under his eyes and less pep in his already uneven step._

_Roadhog hadn’t felt guilty in the slightest, and he hadn’t intentionally left his hook next to the asshole the night after. That night, he had forced himself to grit his teeth and deal with the clicking._

_After two weeks, he hardly noticed the little clinks, murmurs, and ambient little noises that meant that Junkrat was still there._

Roadhog shoved his hook off of the bed and cursed. It hit the ground with a clatter as he sat up and ran his hand through his hair. Fuck everything. If there was any sort of emotion he was feeling for agreeing to help that weasel, it was regret. But past that, it was anger, and hatred, and pure wrath at what that little shitkicker had done to him.

Because this  _wasn’t him._ This wretched man who couldn’t sleep without _background noise,_ who ordered food while wondering what he should feed the ankle biter, who followed his charge around like some kind of massive pet. This wasn’t him. This wasn’t _Roadhog_.

He snarled at his blanketed lap and slammed his fist into the mattress.

A support somewhere beneath him cracked, and the entire bed shuddered for a brief moment before going still. Roadhog waited for a moment for it to give way, but, miraculously, the cheap box spring held.

The Junker sighed and lay back again, the fight drained from him.

It took an hour, but Roadhog finally fell into a restless, dreamless daze.


	4. Chapter 4

By the time Roadhog had gotten his ticket stamped and was waiting in line to board the freighter, he thought his fit, or whatever, had passed again. He had slept better than the previous night, and only looked behind himself in agitation twice when he didn’t hear shuffling steps following right on his ass.

The people who swarmed the port around him gave him a wide berth with the exception of the particularly stupid or the acutely aware. Some of the people standing in his projected radius looked like junkers, who knew they were safe as long as they didn’t step on any toes. He ignored them, impatient to get on the boat.

Once boarded, Roadhog kept his duffle of the remaining money held close to him at all times. He left two packs of miscellaneous supplies in his quarters. He’d had to get another bag for all the crap that Junkrat probably could’ve packed into a single pocket with space still left over. Roadhog had never really paid attention to how he managed it, just carried the pack.

He was standing on the port side, leaning over the railing when he saw it. A garish flash of orange between two people in the crowd, connected to a wiry slip of a man— with dark hair, and two flesh and blood legs.

Roadhog stared harder, but was unable to make out the exact build of the prosthetic arm that had grabbed his attention. It was the man’s right arm, at least up to the elbow…

_The fetid, cottony smell of infection wafting from Junkrat every once in a while was the first sign. For a few days, Roadhog assumed it was nothing. Junkrat would take care of it, and it would just clear up and go away._

_The second sign was the flinch when Junkrat would use his right arm. The final straw was the creeping, swollen redness that peeked through the bandages at his elbow._

_“Take off your arm,” Roadhog finally demanded during one of their stop overs for the night. It was a damn good hiding spot, well out of the way of most junker trails, and one of the few sturdy bits of building for kilometers on end._

_“What? Fuck no,” Junkrat had scoffed, like he thought Roadhog was joking._

_Roadhog didn’t joke. Not often, anyway, and not about untreated infections. Not out here._

_He’d given Junkrat his chance, so he went the more direct route and grabbed the arm in question in one hand and pinned Junkrat with the other. His chest was hot against Roadhog’s skin, hotter than sun-warmed flesh had any right to be. Roadhog’s arm, sweaty from the long ride, carved away the dust and dirt on Junkrat’s chest and exposed how feverish and flushed he was._

_“You dumb twat,” Roadhog rasped, trying to force the limb off. He’d only ever seen Junkrat remove it a few times, so he knew that it twisted, but not where or which way._

_“Fuck off!” Junkrat snapped, trying to kick and punch and wriggle his way out from under Roadhog. “Stop, stop,_ stop _! You wanna kill me, ‘at’s fine, but stop wrenching me arm!”_

_“Not killing you, Junkrat,” Roadhog snapped right back, trying to be as gentle as he could so that he didn’t accidentally break the stupid arm in question. “You’ve got a fucking infection.”_

_“Yeah, so? It’ll go away eventually!” Junkrat had gotten his foot wedged in between them, and gave a hefty kick to Roadhog’s stomach as he spoke._

_“I_ am _going to kill you if you kick me in the jewels,” Roadhog snarled, feeling Junkrat’s boot scrape down his stomach to shove at his hip even harder._

_“If you ain’t trying to kill me, then stop wrenching me arm! Fuck!”_

_“Take it off,” Roadhog demanded again._

_“Fuck you and your mum and your mum’s mum! I ain’t taking it off!”_

_Roadhog growled and heard metal bend under his hand. It made him take a deep breath, and finally just flipped Junkrat onto his back and pinned him to the ground, one massive hand shoving the thin, heaving torso into the dirt floor. Roadhog’s lens-covered eyes glared down at the stupid little twat._

_“You need to take it off,” he finally said, mustering all of his patience and communication skills. “To fix the infection.”_

_“Fix? Who asked anyone to fix anything? I’m fuckin’ fine—“ Junkrat’s rant cut off in a very not-fine scream when Roadhog jostled his prosthetic._

_“If we don’t fix it now, kiss the rest of your fucking arm goodbye, you little cunt.”_

_“_ Christ _, what’s the point in fixing it if you’re just gonna bleedin’ kill me?!” Junkrat spat at Roadhog and snarled at him.  Over the course of the next two rage-charged minutes that Junkrat remained living, a very slow change of expression overtook him as the glob of spittle slid down the lens of Roadhog’s mask._

_“You ain’t tryin’ to kill me.” Well, at least he had the grace to look mollified._

_“I’m thinking about it_ _now_ _,” Roadhog said, low and dangerous._

_“Then what the fuck, mate?” Junkrat tried to pull his arm back from Roadhog’s grip, still looking marginally terrified, like he was ready to start fighting again at any second._

_“You’re in pain, you bloody idiot. I can smell the infection from ten feet away.”_

_Understanding finally dawned on Junkrat’s face, and he shrugged a little. “Oh, that? S’nothin, I’ll rub some dirt on it and the smell will go away, if that’s what’s bothering you.”_

_“No. And it won’t go away, it’s going to get worse and then your arm will fall off.”_

_“S’already off, mate.” Junkrat fluttered his prosthetic fingers at Roadhog even with the arm still trapped by his unyielding grip._

_“You know what I mean,” Hog said wearily._

_Junkrat studied Roadhog carefully before slowly offering up, “It’s never fallen off before.”_

_“Yeah? Well the bit between your arm ’n’ your prosthetic is infected. Don’t take care of it now, it’ll turn black and you’ll have to cut it off. Or die.” The last bit was thrown in, added because Junkrat really didn’t seem to understand the extent of infections, just how bad they could really be. “Or,” he said, when Junkrat looked like he was still trying to figure out if Roadhog was shitting him or not. What did he possibly think Roadhog could gain from getting him to remove the damn prosthetic? “Or, you can stop being a cunt and we can fix it.”_

_Finally, Junkrat seemed to completely deflate. He stopped resisting Roadhog’s hand on his prosthetic and just kind of flopped back on the floor, like he was resigning himself to his fate. Bloody dramatic little wanker._

_“I really gotta take it off?” he asked, like the previous five times weren’t enough. He was staring at his prosthetic fingers, and it was only then that Roadhog realized they were all twitching slightly. How fucked up was his arm?_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Right…” Junkrat said slowly, very deliberately. He brought his left arm up to disengage the prosthetic, and his eyes flicked over to Roadhog with a nervous smile. It was the smile he used when he wasn’t quite sure of what he was doing, but he was going to try it anyways. It was the smile he usually used when trying something new with a bomb. Roadhog didn’t know how to take it being directed at him._

_“Just… leaves me vulnerable, y’know?” Junkrat explained as he unstrapped the elbow guard and slipped his fingers down to grip the base and twist it off. It squelched as it released, and the stench from the infection tripled in strength. Even Junkrat winced a bit but still gave Roadhog a shaky smile, almost guilty, like he hadn’t known it was that bad._

_Junkrat put the prosthetic down next to him, and for a moment looked as vulnerable as he’d said he felt._

_“I’d rather cark it than feel like that.”_

He was on the move, back towards the ramp that led onto the docks before he even realized he was worried. He shoved past some poor brave soul who was trying to tell him that it was only ten minutes before the freighter launched, and it was about then that he realized he was angry.  More than angry.  _Furious_.

“Stay still!” he boomed over the crowd.

Everyone within the next hundred meters turned to look at him, including the junker with the orange arm. As soon as he noticed Roadhog’s mask locked onto him, his eyes grew huge, practically bugging out of his head. He dropped his bag and took a shaky step back. Roadhog took one step forward, and then the junker broke into a run.

Roadhog started to run as well, able to keep up with the man just by the incredibly useful phenomenon that always seemed to happen when Roadhog was angry and moving through a crowd. People naturally parted before him as he ran, their attention already grabbed by the thin, cursing junker struggling to push through them and then drawn immediately back to the towering goliath charging after him. The dock beneath him echoed with the force of his heavy gait, the duffle he still had on him swung back and forth against his left side, obstructing his grab for his hook on his hip.  He snarled and ripped the duffle over his head, allowing it to thud to the dock.  Roadhog stopped moving and his eyes followed the junker, his hook in his hand.

Roadhog waited until he knew he had a clear shot before he slung it after the fleeing junker. The hook bit into the man’s stomach and, along with the wicked nails along the curve of the sharp metal,  cinched the hold as Roadhog hauled him in.

 

As the junker got closer, Roadhog realized that the shade of orange was slightly off. The build was different, more cylindrical than a tapering forearm and the wider wrist joint. It wasn’t Junkrat’s.

Still, he pulled the man in, noticing once he was close enough that the man was fumbling with a gun holstered in the front of his pants. It was caught under the hook and had even managed to keep one of Hog’s nails from getting to his flesh.

Roadhog gave a very practiced flick of his wrist, releasing the junker from the hook. As soon as he was free, the man yanked his gun up and fired just as Roadhog slapped his hand over the muzzle. A jolting pain ricocheted up his arm as the bullet tore through flesh and tendons and the heat from the muzzle seared his palm. He yanked the gun from the junker, whipping him across the face for the trouble.

“Was just gonna let you go, too,” he grumbled, releasing the clip onto the ground and firing the remaining bullet into the concussed man’s flesh hand.

The junker let out a high, pained shriek as Roadhog turned away and eyed the freighter. The ticket had cost a lot, his chopper and supplies were still loaded on it. He’d been waiting for this trip a long time.

He grabbed his duffle of cash and set off for the boat with a swirl of resentment and apprehension in his stomach. This was going to be a bitch to deal with. Not just the boat—all of it. Finding out where they were keeping Junkrat, riding out there, killing everyone, and somehow getting Junkrat to not immediately shove several frag grenades up his ass. All of it.

The ramp was being untethered even as he strode up to it, and the workers stopped so he could mount the ramp back to the boat. Instead, Roadhog stepped up to the woman who had attempted to prevent him from leaving the freighter minutes before and stared down at her.

“Sir?” she said, after a long and undoubtedly terrifying silence.

“My shit needs to come off the boat,” he told her.

The woman pursed her lips and swallowed. “I… I’m very sorry, but all of the cargo has been stowed—“

Roadhog cut her off with a fairly gentle hand on her shoulder. He leaned down, putting himself face to snout with her and said with no hint of amusement or preamble, “then I’ll sink the fucking boat.”

“You’ll—“ She paled and tried to take a step back, but his hand was firm on her shoulder and showed no signs of moving.

“If my shit ain’t here on this dock in ten minutes,” he clarified firmly, “then I’ll sink the boat.”

One of the men who’d stopped untethering the boat was speaking into the shoulder of his safety vest, not discreetly at all.  He paused a beat before clearing his throat and continuing.

“Call the cops and I sink the boat too,” Roadhog said a little louder.

There was another pause. 

“What cabin were you in, sir?” the woman asked, her jaw tight with obvious unease. Roadhog smirked behind his mask and he released the woman’s shoulder to hand her his cabin key.

Police sirens chased Roadhog out of the city limits, but they didn’t follow him too far. They had bigger things to worry about than junkers  _leaving_ their precious, pristine little city. 

Roadhog stopped at the first petrol station he could find. He topped off his coolant and made sure his radiator cap was screwed down tight. He already knew the oil level and just hoped the gunky old shit would keep her running long enough. He and Junkrat had jury-rigged an oil cooler kit onto the side of the engine as well as a cylinder head cooler.

Hopefully she wouldn’t overheat until he found the junkers’ base.

* * *

 

As the adrenaline began to wear off, so did Roadhog’s resolve. He tried to turn around twice before he’d even gotten close to where the radiation seeped into the air from the decimated outback. In the end, he always worked his way back around to pressing forward.

Roadhog stopped his bike and shut down completely for a fifteen minute interval fifty klicks before the Darling River bridge. From there, it was another hundred klicks to the Omnium. It was the best place to begin his search. 

Roadhog’s indecision and restlessness were his only problems until he hit the other side of the bridge, which was covered in graffiti and blown half to hell. After he had carefully navigated the chopper’s front wheel off of the half-foot drop it took to disembark the bridge, bullets struck the ground around him. They were sprayed from a mounted gun on a Junker’s wheeled scrap-heap, one driving and another manning the salvaged weapon. 

He drew out his shotgun and revved the chopper as the vehicle tried to close in on him. There was no way he could get back up on the bridge without getting off the bike and picking it up. The duo thought he was trapped. Cute.

Roadhog circled patiently, dodging the wildly inaccurate sprays of bullets and trying to come across like he was scared when really, it was just a numb sense of finality. Once they were in range, he calmly stopped and stepped off the bike. He raised his gun to shoot scrap at the windshield, not pausing a second before throwing the hook through the weakened glass. It shattered, and he couldn’t help a smirk as he yanked the driver out by the neck. If that didn’t kill the unfortunate Junker, the vehicle driving straight over him finished him off as it continued forward.

Roadhog unhooked the near-spent reel of chain from his belt and dropped it unceremoniously into the dust before he hopped back on his bike and circled again to get out of the range of the now-unmanned vehicle. The Junker up top caught on when he looked back to see the body in the dirt with the obvious tire tracks, and maneuvered himself into the driver’s seat.

Gunning the engine, Roadhog sped past the driver’s side and raised his scrap gun. The man managed to duck in time for the shot to miss taking off his head, but Roadhog heard a howl as his ammo ricocheted around the metal insides of the cabin.

He turned his bike to watch the rig ram straight into the bridge’s steel support beam and patiently waited for any signs of life. When none came, he shrugged and got off his chopper. He walked over and put two shots into the limp body of the Junker he’d pulled out first before he reached down to tug his hook free from the man’s ruined neck.

A gasp came from the wrecked vehicle, and there came the distinct clicking of a ruined starter trying to engage.

Roadhog unbuckled the strap that secured his mask around the back of his neck and shoved the stiflingly hot thing up as he walked casually back toward the totaled vehicle. On the way, he collected his chain reel and tucked it back onto its space on his hip. The hook trailed behind him, the internal spring system reeling it back onto the spool slowly. He pulled his canteen out of his back pocket to take a long drink of water before returning it and wiping his mouth with the back of his glove.

He pulled the mask back down and rolled his neck, feeling several satisfying cracks. Once he got to the rig, he ripped the door open, staring down at his struggling prey.

“Shit, shit, shit…” the Junker inside whinged, twisting in his seat. His head was bleeding profusely, and one of the hood ornaments had been caught by the steel beam and now impaled him into the driver’s seat by his left shoulder. The spikes had looked fearsome before, but now most of them had fallen off or simply sat lopsided on the bent hood.

Roadhog hummed and leaned on the crumpled edge of the searing hot metal, eyeing the damage and judging that this man definitely wouldn’t make it out of this on his own. He’d probably take days to die. 

“I got some thoughts,” Roadhog told him, casually pulling his scrap gun out from its holster and shoving another handful of crap into it. He snapped it back closed and rested the barrel in the palm of his other hand. “And if you want to die nice and quick, ‘stead of me just leaving you here to rot, you’ll listen.”

The man spat a chipped off bit of an incisor at Roadhog and grimaced when the hot air drug over his damaged tooth.

Roadhog let out a weary sigh and holstered his gun.  “Attitude,” he said, low and dangerous before grabbing the man by the side of his face and digging his thick thumb into the corner of the man’s mouth.  He wiggled his thumb, buffered by the Junker’s own flesh, between the man’s molars and then back behind his teeth to lock open his jaw.  With his other hand, he took a handful of scrap from his ammunition pouch and rather gently fed it into the Junker’s open mouth.  Just enough that he wouldn’t get his mouth all cut up from staying still, but God forbid he moved his tongue at all.  Roadhog removed his hand from holding open the Junker’s jaw and clamped it over his mouth.  Then, he pulled duct tape out of his utility belt and tore off a strip just long enough to cover his mouth.

Once that had replaced his hand, Roadhog drew back and admired his handywork.

Tears streaked through the blood and dust that coated the Junker’s face.  

“Few days ago, I gave up my boss for some cash,” Roadhog started, crossing his arms and leaning against the car.  He watched the man slowly begin to pay more attention to him and his words rather than the extreme amounts of pain he was in. 

The vehicle shifted as Roadhog moved to sit on the bent up hood, unconcerned about the jagged screws that used to hold the spike currently impaling his captive.  "I  _don't_  care about him.  That shit gets you killed out here—you know that."  He motioned to the man's partner, dead body mangled by his own vehicle.  If the Junker in front of him hadn't teamed up with that dipshit, he wouldn't be about to die now.  Poetic, really.  "And the kid—he was going to die anyways, wasn't he?  If it wasn't out here," he paused to motion to the outback, "then it was in a prison cell or a police shootout somewhere else.  He's not the brightest bulb, y'know.  Talking trash and antagonizing every goddamned living thing he can see."  Roadhog snorted ruefully.  Junkrat really was a goddamned piece of work.  It was a miracle he'd survived to find Roadhog.  Even more of a miracle he had convinced Hog to play babysitter for so long.

"Anyway, kid was gonna bite it, might as well make a buck off it, yeah?"  The man nodded slowly when he realized that Roadhog was expecting an answer from him.

"S'right, only the strong survive out here," he rumbled to himself.

Junkrat had lived alone for most of his life in Junkertown.  After his parents had sold him, he had outlived his use, growing taller and ganglier with the passing years, less able to fit into the little spaces that held the untouched bits of the Omnium.  He had picked up taking stuff apart and putting together new stuff from observation and the boredom that usually lead to depression.  Not Junkrat, though.

Junkrat had thrived, nicking and breaking down and building up until he discovered pyrotechnic chemistry.

"Well, I mean, he can take care of himself, he's just—" crafty, quick witted but, all in all, bloody  _daft_ sometimes, "look, if he was strong enough to survive, he wouldn't have hired me as a bodyguard."

Roadhog waved his gun in the man's face.  Sweat poured down the Junker's temples, and a mix of blood and spit seeped from the corner of his mouth.

"Fucking hell," Roadhog growled, reaching back to unbuckle the strap running across the back of his neck and pulling his canteen out for a drink.

The man made a noise in the back of his throat, and Roadhog made a show of taking a nice long pull of his water before lowering the canteen and wiping his mouth.

"So, if this little ankle biter is so stupid, weak and pigheaded, why the bloody _fuck_ am I going after him?"  Roadhog played with the cap of his canteen, once again not really talking to his captive anymore, but staring at the green and rust colored sunset.  That was the direction he was going to be heading.

The man made a noise again, and this time it sounded like half a word.

He hadn't been expecting a two way conversation-- tried to prevent it with the scrap and tape, really.  He hesitated before reaching over to rip off the tape and then the Junker was coughing and spitting and retching bits and bobs of rusty and bloody metal from his mouth.

" 'S that?" Roadhog asked.

"He's your mate," the man croaked, panting through his mouth.

"Eh..." Roadhog shook his head and folded the tape into a small triangle as something for his hands to do.  "Not mates, really."

The Junker shook his head and summoned a mouthful of saliva and blood before turning his head and spitting out the missing door of his trashed ride.  "You're mates.  Travel with someone long enough, take enough of their shit and dish your own, you're mates."  He shrugged with his right shoulder and winced before sniffing, snot and blood leaking down the sides of his mouth.  He cleared his throat and spat again.

Roadhog snorted and shifted, causing the entire truck to creak. 

"Dingos are going to come out soon," the Junker said nervously.

Roadhog grunted in agreement.  

"What say you finish me off and go save your mate, eh?" he suggested with a bloody smile.

Hog's eyes narrowed behind his mask and he kicked off of the truck while heaving himself up and onto his feet.  "We're  _not_  mates," he snapped.

The Junker had begun begging, shouting, wheedling for death as soon as he realized that Hog was disembarking the wrecked vehicle.

Hog hummed as he buckled his mask back into place.  The yips would start as soon as the dirty filter of light from the sun disappeared.  There was blood everywhere out there, and a whimpering mess of prey pinned and ready to die.

He kicked the chopper to life and set off again in roughly the direction of the Omnium.  Before the sun even came up, a few lights winked in the distance.  

Roadhog righted his course and blinked wearily at the growing number and span of lights in the distance.  He would probably reach the Omnium by dawn.  Then, there would be hell to pay.


	5. Chapter 5

Junkertown itself was built around the very center of the ruined Omnium, within the sturdy metal walls pockmarked with weathered window frames and rust. The buildings were rudimentary blocks, sturdy lean-tos cobbled together out of sheets of corrugated steel and melted down omnics of several generations. Most of the buildings making up the foundation of the town were built on ground level, surrounding the massive pit where the core used to be. When it had all gone to hell, the core had taken the roof of the Omnium complex with it, leaving the hollow shell of metal to hulk over the collection of homes and businesses that had become Junkertown.

At one time, the floor of the entire place had been a thick, glossy slab of pristine metal, but with time and radiation storms it was now as rough, brown and dusty as any other part of the outback.

Beneath Junkertown, there sprawled an endless, gaping hole in the earth. Melted and hardened slag cascaded down the edges of the pit in the middle, cutting off the view of the first three basement levels. Some of the stairs were still serviceable, and one of the elevators had been reclaimed.  However, it was only accessible to those able to pay the steep fees. 

Even with a curtain of twisted, broken metal, it was easy to see people milling about on other levels, stretching down into the darkness. No one knew how far down the Omnium pit really went. As people explored further, they would always find more and more twisted and melted pathways, closed doors that couldn’t be opened by force, and every time someone found a way to a deeper floor, they’d find blocked off stairs or hallways that led to another floor further downward.

There was no need for guards at the front gate. If anyone or anything came to Junkertown to make trouble, it would be taken care of. Junkers could handle their own safety.

Different sects of Junkers and assorted gangs made their homes in the first ten floors of the Omnium office building, which was really the only original structure that anyone felt comfortable walking on above ground level. It sat off to the side of the Junkertown ring and was the safest place in the joint. No one would investigate noises coming from there. 

Roadhog left his bike in the desecrated parking lot that was half-covered in rust-colored dirt. He double checked his full bag of ammunition, made sure his gun was loaded and his gas canisters were all ready to go. He struck out for the town itself first.

He hadn’t been back in a year.

Something that always held true about Junkertown was that it was in a constant state of change. One gang or another would fight for turf or control or _whatever_ they thought they could get out of the place and the people that couldn’t stick up for themselves fell into the cracks somewhere. Roadhog was known to stick up for himself. 

“Hey, fella!”

Roadhog turned as soon as he stepped through the main entrance— the melted and gutted security terminals were still there, bullet-ridden and worn down by a lack of doors or windows to keep out the elements— to face a weathered young man, dark skinned and with the smirk of someone who believed he’d found a meal ticket. He held a gun in one hand, pointed at Roadhog’s head. 

He had to be part of a new wave of young Junkers. They periodically filtered in from the wastes to try and eke out a living in the innards of the largest scrap pile in Oz.  Some of them died, others found their place.

“Shove off,” Roadhog told him, not in the mood to swat at flies. At least, he wasn’t until the gun went off and clipped his shoulder, so he swatted.

Hook in his left hand, he reached out to grab the gun with his right. The barrel was hot against his fingers where his gloves didn’t quite reach. He yanked it forward and the Junker didn’t let go.  Hog brought the hook up to catch him in the shoulder for his trouble. 

The gun clattered to the floor, and the Junker drove two ineffective fists into Hog’s masked face before the larger man turned, dragging the kid over his shoulder by the vicious curve of the hook and slammed him down into the dust.

The kid gasped for air, halfway back on his feet before Roadhog slammed him a second time, knocking the wind from him again. 

“Who’s in charge?” he growled. 

“B-Bangaroo’s in charge, mate,” the Junker gasped before bracing his feet on Roadhog’s gut and shoving. Roadhog didn’t move an inch. “I-I’m part of his crew. You’ll fuckin’ pay for this, I swear—“ his voice cut into a scream as Roadhog lifted him up with the hook and slammed him down again.

“Bangaroo?” Roadhog asked, curling his hand around the Junker’s neck and beginning to squeeze. Distantly behind him, he heard boots echo on dust-covered metal. He lifted the kid again when he didn’t answer right away, wringing another scream from him. With a growl, Roadhog ripped the hook from the Junker’s shoulder and kept his hand firmly around his neck.

“Pitch?” an approaching voice called. The boots slowed to a hesitant crawl, and metal clicked as weapon safeties were taken off. Roadhog dragged the young man up with him, squeezing his throat in a warning. He felt the Junker swallow between his thumb and middle finger.  His feet were left to dangle six inches from the ground, and Hog wasn’t even holding him up eye to eye.

The Junkers came around the corner and slowly fanned out, making it impossible for Roadhog to focus in just one direction. From around him, he could hear a few of them whisper his name, allowing himself a smirk behind his mask. He let out an unsettling chuckle.

“I’m back,” he announced before he tossed the now unarmed kid in his hand at them and drawing out his scrap gun. “Think you lot have somethin’ a’mine.”

One of the Junkers stepped forward, a gun still aimed at Roadhog. It was an altered shotgun, similar to his own scrap gun, with a sawed off barrel that had been shaped into something only about a foot long. It wasn’t going to be enough to take Roadhog down, but it would be enough to make him enjoy taking the man’s life if he opened fire.

“Things’ve changed since you left, mate,” the Junker told him. He was pale beneath the fine layers of grease and dirt that clung to him like it clung to the walls. He must’ve spent most of his life after the crisis in the bowels of the Omnium, rather than the town or out in the wasteland.  He was built for scrapping inside Junkertown, having the wiry build of most other scrap frackers. Roadhog didn’t know him, always having been more interested in what he could find outside the Omnium. 

“Heard Bangaroo’s in charge,” was all Roadhog said in reply, hook still held loosely in his hand. 

The young Junker, Pitch, was bouncing on the balls of his feet, one hand clapped over the hole in his shoulder to try and stem the bleeding. The energy was draining out of him when he realized his mates weren’t immediately rushing in to finish Roadhog off.

“A six-on-one fight’s pretty cinched, innit?” he asked one of the other Junkers softly.

A hook whipped out and Roadhog dragged the kid back in as he howled. None of his comrades reached out to help him, though a scrappy looking woman missing an eye shifted forward a step before an older hand rested on her elbow and she stilled. 

“Is it?” Roadhog asked Pitch, his scrap gun jammed into the kid’s stomach. He was the same age as Junkrat, maybe even younger. It irritated him that he noticed that now. Roadhog scoffed and let the terrified kid go, shoving him back at his mates. “Take me to Bangaroo. Save me the trouble of goin’ through you lot and finding him myself.”

The inside of Junkertown had changed. The shabby lean-tos had disappeared, and shelters had been pieced together with metal slabs riveted together into somewhat decent-looking walls. They’d been attached together for the obvious thrum of business on one side of the gaping hole, while the other was lined with what looked like stacks of blocks made into housing. Very egalitarian. 

“What the shit?” Roadhog growled as he looked around.

“No shit,” the leader agreed as they began to walk around the massive pit in the middle of the town.

There were eight rickety bridges running from the sides of the pit into the center, over which hung a massive, ugly circle of pieced together scrap. It was stained with blood and there were still gristly chunks on it that hadn’t been picked up by scavengers. It seemed to sway before Roadhog’s eyes with the slight updraft that circulated from deep within the pit, even with the spindly supports that jutted out from it to connect to lower floors, it looked like it wouldn’t hold a leaf, much less a person.

“What the shit?” Roadhog repeated.

“New form of entertainment ’n’ punishment. Got a problem? Have a fight. In the middle of the fucking hellpit, or else, everyone involved dies,” the Junker told him.

Roadhog snorted derisively and kept walking. 

The office building finally loomed tall before them, and the only Junker that entered with him was the sort-of leader who had stepped up to control the situation before his mates bit it. 

Mates could get you killed, Roadhog reminded himself as he entered the blown-out doors of the building. The interior was definitely more put together than the last time he had been there. It was almost clean.

The desks that hadn’t been completely smashed and used for parts had been consolidated into serviceable pieces of furniture, and now held up rows of different weapons and ammunitions. The weapons probably had the same security his chopper did. No one was going to take anything from someone who could, and would, find and kill them slowly for it. Might as well just die more quickly from whatever had caused you to consider stealing it in the first place. 

Roadhog was surprised to see that the first floor was mostly clear of people. Usually a couple of gangs would be trying to get a foothold on the place, establishing a base before bidding for use of the nicer upper floors. 

The junker lead him through to the elevator and pressed the up button. It definitely hadn’t been working the last time Hog was here.

“Things okay under Bangaroo?” Hog asked, glaring at the light ticking down from the eleventh floor to the first.

“Suppose,” he replied, shrugging. “They’re real industrious.”

“I see.”

“But, ah…” the man trailed off and hummed. “Unstable,” he mumbled once the ding of the elevator covered his reply. Roadhog almost missed it. 

He’d heard a lot about Bangaroo and his brother, Kangaboom before. Never met them. Had definitely stolen from them. 

A lot.

Everything he’d heard all pointed to  _strange_ in every definition of the word, and that was all coming from lowlife junkers who’d repurposed toilet seats into safety harnesses for scrap rigs.

“What floor we going to?” Hog asked, casually shifting his scrap gun to nudge the Junker’s side as they got on.

“Twelve. They’ve rebuilt a lot, brought up a lot of slag no one wanted to use and turned it into supports, walls, all manner of shit. Bit impressive,” he admitted, hitting the button for the twelfth floor.

The elevator lurched and began to carry them up. Roadhog worried for a brief second about the weight capacity, but brushed it off. He couldn’t afford the tension, he needed to appear calm in the face of two potentially batshit adversaries. 

The elevator stalled at the eighth floor, and the Junker bounced for a moment and gestured for Roadhog to do the same. The ride had already begun to creak more than Roadhog would like, but he mimicked the movement. Despite his lack of any feeling of security, the elevator responded with a worrying series of noises and continued churning its way up the floors again.

“Ta,” the other man murmured.

Roadhog grunted in reply, rolling his shoulders and cracking his neck idly. 

When the doors of the elevator finally opened, Roadhog let the Junker exit first and then followed, his hook and gun still ready in his hands.

Two men stood at the far end of the wide open space before them. The entire floor looked like it had been gutted, patched, and remade again and again. Supports had been meticulously laid out to keep the roof safely above them until more permanent solutions could be installed. 

The men were definitely different from other junkers. Now that Roadhog thought about it, really, he hadn’t ever heard anyone refer to them as junkers at all. They were more along the lines of gun runners and smugglers, from what he’d heard. Nearly all junkers had dabbled in it, but it was hard to commit to one source of income after the crisis. Most of the ones who made profits worked with Junkers occasionally, but kept themselves out of the middle of things and rarely, if ever, came to Junkertown, much less set up shop and take over.

The two men were thin and broad shouldered, but short. A full head shorter than Junkrat, only chest high to Roadhog.

Despite that, they approached him with absolute confidence. They walked in perfect step with one another. They wore matching clothing. Hog had known Kangaboom and Bangaroo were twins, but he hadn’t seen two people look so alike in a long, long time. It was a little jarring, and he knew they used that to throw most people off. The only difference between their faces was that the one on the right had had his nose reset recently, and there was a definite split across the bridge.

“Grey,” the men said in unison to the Junker next to him. Their voices were almost warm, but were far too relaxed for Hog’s liking. Everything about the two men immediately put him on edge. From their matching leather weapon vests and matching coveralls—the tops unzipped and tied about the waist with the  _same goddamn knot—_ to their scrap-less boots, they felt more like suits pretending to play the part of junkers, rather than men who belonged in Junkertown. They certainly didn’t deserve to run the damn place.

“Boss.” Grey nodded at both of them nervously, then hiked his thumb at Roadhog. “This is an old resident what wanted to speak to the head cheese,” he told them, directing their eyes back to Roadhog.

Each of them was missing an arm. The one on the right was missing his right arm, and his twin was missing the opposite. The prosthetics, reaching up to their shoulders, looked awfully similar to the prosthetic pieces worn by the woman who’d proposed the deal for Junkrat in the first place.

Roadhog lifted his chin as a way of greeting, and the man on the right crossed his arms while the one on the left clapped his hands together and rubbed some of the dust and what looked like pencil smudges off of his hands. “What can we do for you?”  There was something off with how the man looked at him—a manic sort of upturn to his lips.

“I’m looking for my boss,” Roadhog told them, slow and calm. “Figure you know where he is, if he’s in town.”

“What, did he skip a payment or something?” the one on the right asked, snorting.

“Sorry mate, we can’t help you with collections,” the one on the left followed up with a shrug, his shoulders looked like they were shaking with a barely withheld titter.  It was a familiar sight, because Junkrat did the same goddamned thing all the time.  These two were fucking with him.

Roadhog laughed a little and shook his head. He tugged his overalls up a mite and reached back to holster his scrap gun as he took a few ponderous steps forward. “Were just that, I’d find him myself,” he told them, watching the two men closely to see if they found him at all a threat as he stepped forward. The one on the left tensed while the one on the right raised a brow and watched him carefully, but he didn’t seem concerned. They had matching hand guns strapped to their vests and Hog could see the shape of a holstered ankle pistol beneath the drape of their coveralls. The one on the left had the safety on. The one on the right kept it off. 

Roadhog stopped his advance a few meters from the two men and cocked his head to the side. “Bangaroo,” he said, nodding at the brother on the left, and the man seemed to preen slightly at the accuracy, his shoulders relaxing just a hair and the quakes subsiding. “And Kangaboom.” He nodded at the brother on the right.

“Well,” Kangaboom said with a shrug, “you’re better than most.”

His posture didn’t change at all, he still looked too carefully unconcerned to be truly relaxed in Roadhog’s presence. They weren’t underestimating him, then. At least they didn’t rely so heavily on their word-of-mouth reputation that they ignored danger. 

“Right, mate, so how come you need us?” Bangaroo asked, leaning an elbow on his brother’s shoulder and kicking one ankle over the other with a grin that was just a hair too wide.

“Think some Junkers are hiding out here with him. One of them has a model of arm what looks a lot like yours,” he told them, motioning to the twins’ arms with his hand. 

“Lots of Junkers in this town,” Kangaboom said.

Bangaroo followed it up with, “Lots of Junkers hiding.”

“Lots of Junkers got your kinds of pieces?” Roadhog asked, again pointing to Kangaboom’s prosthetic and then to the weapon at his side. “Ain’t a lot of places out here to get that kind of quality.”

“They are uncommon,” Kangaboom agreed slowly. “Roo makes them himself.”

“Willing to put together a custom piece, though,” Bangaroo said.

“For a price.”

“Boom sells loads of guns to loads of Junkers,” Bangaroo added to his brother’s comment, an immediate response.

It was annoying as shit.

Roadhog huffed and cracked his neck again. They were trying to guide him off the scent, but it was too heavy handed. Roadhog wasn’t a moron.

“I know Junkrat’s here, so—“ he paused for a second when Bangaroo’s face fell from his pleasant mask to a dark frown. Roadhog couldn’t stop the smirk behind his mask. 

“So, give me back my boss and we’ll be on our way,” he finished.

“Hm…Well, y’know. There’s a little problem with that plan, mate,” Kangaboom told him, scratching at the five o’clock shadow on his jaw. It was the closest Hog had ever seen anyone in this shit town come to clean-shaven. 

“He’s got a lot to pay for,” Bangaroo said. 

Hog tilted his head to the side. For fuck’s sake, it had only been two days. “Like?”

“Well, he’s stolen from us before,” Bangaroo replied, beginning to pace the floor.

Roadhog knew that. He’d been there. He’d told Junkrat not to spray his goddamn name all over the place, but the supplies that they’d nicked from Bangaroo included several different colors of paint, and his own name was one of the things Junkrat knew how to write well. 

“Which I’m sure you already know,” Kangaboom said, cleaning his nails with the hunting knife Hog had seen strapped to the back of his belt. 

“And for another thing, he broke Boom’s nose.”

Bangaroo was circling him, too late for Roadhog to do anything about it. He wasn’t going to start a ruckus this high up, with a good possibility of bringing the place down. Junkrat might be in the building, further down, and get caught in a collapse. He’d rather they act first. It was always more satisfying to kill an opponent who thought they’d gotten one up on him. 

“He kicked Roo in the jewels, Hoggy,” Kangaboom shrugged, like there was nothing he could do, like there wasn’t a reason he would know Junkrat’s stupid, goddamned nickname for him.

Roadhog felt a sinking feeling in his gut. “Lots of blokes’d kill a man for less,” he probed, the unspoken question in his tone.  He felt a familiar ache in the pit of his stomach, like lava was boiling up and suffusing through his entire torso.  He was already mad at the shits for their annoying mirror aesthetic, but the thought that they had broken Junkrat down and then killed him already—

Kangaboom smirked, and Roadhog heard the scuff of a boot on metal too close behind him. He pivoted on his heel, striking hard with the hook in his hand. The metal glanced off of Bangaroo’s prosthetic, not catching on anything substantial. His other hand was already drawing his gun, firing a round in the general direction of Kangaboom behind him before the barrel even fully cleared the holster. So much for not causing a ruckus.

Roadhog thought he felt the floor sway beneath him, but ignored it for the more pressing problem at hand: two junkers who, by the reactions of those around them, had a reputation more dangerous than his own and a natural affinity for teamwork. 

Catching sight of Bangaroo on his right, Roadhog swerved to the left, trying to get a bead on both him and Kangaboom, waiting for one of them to stay still long enough for him to throw his hook.

A hard object slammed into the base of his skull, but the stars dancing in front of his eyes from the blow didn’t prevent him from whipping his hook around and getting a satisfying catch on something that made Kangaboom hiss and fire a bullet into his shoulder.

The pain made Roadhog grunt, but he twisted his hook and wrenched Kangaboom around and down onto the floor. Raising his gun, he fired a blast of scrap at Bangaroo as a bullet narrowly missed his head. Roadhog growled and slammed his knee into Kangaboom’s chest to pin him through sheer weight alone, and wrenched his hook from the man’s stomach. When Kangaboom stuck his knife deep into Roadhog’s leg and dragged it through flesh, Hog shifted his weight as a warning and felt the man’s ribcage creak beneath him. He still needed to know where Junkrat was being held and wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to catch Bangaroo without killing him. The man was incredibly mobile, and didn’t seem bothered by seeing his brother bloody and pinned beneath Hog’s weight.

The position came with disadvantages, most of them being that Hog couldn’t move much unless he wanted to cave in Kangaboom’s chest— which he kind of did—or risk letting him slip away and once again end up with two opponents. Opponents who liked to stand at opposite ends of his sight line and talk irritating, poncy circles around him.

Kangaboom was also bleeding from Roadhog’s first scrap blast. It was only a few nicks, but it meant he hadn’t been able to dodge all of it fast enough, and it gave Roadhog a better gauge on just how mobile and perceptive his brother might be. 

Hog tossed his hook, and Bangaroo dodged it easily. He tossed again, not really trying, and Bangaroo dodged out of the way. He evaded two more throws with an echoing laugh, and Roadhog took two more bullets to the torso. Warm blood oozed down his shoulder and chest, dripping onto his overalls and his captive. Kangaboom, to Roadhog’s quiet delight, was definitely having trouble breathing.

Roadhog tossed his hook one more time, ever so slightly to the right, and as Bangaroo dodged left, he was met with a blast from the scrap gun. Half the shot hit home, and Roadhog heard a muted gasp from Kangaboom beneath him as Bangaroo cried out. His flesh hand went to his side, his shoulder, and then his face, finding the damage. Roadhog used his momentary confusion to lash out with the hook again, but Kangaboom brought up his prosthetic hand to slam against the hunting knife still lodged in Roadhog’s leg. The hook missed its target, and Bangaroo unloaded the rest of his clip. Most of it missed Hog, but another bullet buried itself in his chest. It was enough to make him fall to the side with a grunt, allowing Kangaboom to get back on his feet and unload two more shots into Roadhog’s side. 

“Fuck  _him!”_ Bangaroo snarled, reloading his gun and taking aim at Roadhog’s head.

Kangaboom grabbed his brother’s hand and averted the first shot, pulling the gun from Bangaroo altogether when the other Junker shoved him. Blood had started to drip into Bangaroo’s right eye, causing him to blink rapidly. 

“What? I almost fuckin’ lost you, y’piece of shit!” he snapped, all of the built up pretentious tone gone, and he grabbed for the gun as Kangaboom jerked back away from him. Bangaroo grabbed his brother’s vest, tugging at it childishly. “Let me finish the little piggy off! It’ll make up for not killin’ that sniveling little skag boss of his soon’s he broke.”

Roadhog shifted and pulled one of his canisters out of his bag at that. It slotted into one of his filters, and he breathed as deeply as he could with one lung. It got easier fast, and for a moment he itched intensely everywhere he’d been hurt. The brothers continued to argue about whether or not to kill him now or use him to get Junkrat to talk, but they fell silent as Roadhog stood up. 

“Tell me where my sniveling little skag of a boss is, and I might let one’a you live,” he said, voice low and dangerous. His hook reeled slowly back in, the chain slipping across his index and middle fingers as he waited for it to return to his hand. The brothers just stared.

“How the fuck—“

Roadhog took that moment of confusion to lash out with the hook again, and this time when he set it, there was a satisfying jerk of flesh and the grating of metal on bone. He shivered and reached back to flick the stop on the spring, jerking Bangaroo towards him. He saw the man’s face for a brief moment, mouth just starting to open, before he shot his gun straight into it. 

“Roo!” Kangaboom jerked his gun up, and Hog could already see the technique in his posture—leagues better than his brother’s.

Growling, Hog grabbed his hook back from Bangaroo’s sagging body before sending it out for the other twin. 

Kangaboom dodged, firing back at him with no sign of the random, wild spray that Bangaroo had had. His bullets hit Roadhog barely off center, slamming into his gut and chest. When he spoke, his voice was choked and layered with a thick coating of hate.  “Didn’t take much to break that stupid little twat,” he said as Roadhog pressed foward, squeezing off blast after blast and shoving handfuls of crap into the barrels when it reached the end of its load. 

Roadhog didn’t answer, just felt that liquid hot rage bubble higher and hotter until all he could see was Kanagaboom, bloody and dead before him.  He wanted to kill the man so badly.  Needed to.  He felt like he might fall off the deep end if he didn’t.

Kangaboom circled closer and closer, forcing Roadhog to turn faster to keep up with his constant movement. Even when there was just one, it was annoying.

“Hold still!” Roadhog snarled, lashing out with his hook and catching a support beam. He jerked the chain back in frustration, without thinking, and the pillar of scrap crumpled and snapped like a toothpick. Hog fired his gun and lashed out with the hook again in quick succession, trying to trap Kangaboom into getting caught or, at least, slowing down. Anything to prevent him from running back and forth and dodging in circles around Roadhog.

Kangaboom laughed as he got in another shot. This time it tore through Roadhog’s knee, and he was forced to slump to the quaking floor. “That little shit was broken just as soon as you handed him over,” Kangaboom sneered as he moved out of the way of a hook that took down another support beam, and then another. As the second support fell, the ominous groan of metal echoed above them. Kangaboom froze for a moment to stare at the ceiling, just long enough for Hog to get his hook into him and drag him close. 

“You’ll tear this place down!” Kangaboom yelled, looking like he suddenly regretted goading Roadhog.  Roadhog was too satisfied with finally catching him to pay attention to the chunks of metal beginning to fall.

“I will,” Roadhog growled before unloading the gun into Kangaboom’s face so that he matched his brother. Roadhog tossed the body away.  His scrap gun slipped from his fingers and clunked to the floor.

His chest throbbed with violent, wracking heat, and Roadhog raised his hand to the puncture. It hadn’t hit his heart, but it had hit something. Something  _bad_. He fumbled with the pack at his hip and wrapped his fingers around one of his gas canisters. He lost feeling in his arm around then, and he wondered if he was falling or if it was blood loss. Everything felt dim, and distant.

Roadhog jammed the canister into his mask and inhaled sharply.  Feeling returned with the jolting sensation of a sudden fall as two floors dropped from beneath him and another five crashed down from above. 


	6. Chapter 6

There was nothing but ringing in Roadhog’s ears, and the feeling like he was floating in the ocean. Waves rocked him back and forth, side to side, and for a moment, he tried to swim. There was that primal urge, to keep his head above water. He was a strong swimmer—was there an undertow keeping him under? He couldn’t breathe. He tried to struggle—maybe he was close to the surface—but he couldn’t hold his mouth closed much longer. 

He finally couldn’t hold it and he gasped. He braced himself for water rushing into his mouth, into his lungs—but, no, it wasn’t water, it was his lungs not letting him breathe in. The pain rushed him all at once, suddenly they hurt, and he hurt, every  _goddamned thing_ on him hurt. Hog had the brief, hazy thought that it felt like a building had fallen on him, when he remembered that _he’d_ been falling. He’d been yanking the supports from the room, killing two men who looked so alike—Kangaboom and Bangaroo. 

Maybe he could breathe if he coughed. His chest ached, and he felt a warm, thick liquid fill his mouth when he tried.

Well. Drowning in his own blood wasn’t the absolute  _worst_ way he could go.

He tried to move his hand, testing it. His fingers couldn’t feel the rough surface he lay on, but he could feel lancing pain up his arm every time he tried to move a finger individually. His hand fumbled numbly up to the satchel on his waist. He had to be careful about this to find just what he was looking for. Carefully, he trapped all of his belongings against one side of the bag, grasping in just the right diameter, hoping to fish out his last gas container. 

Like hell was he going to die under less than half a building after all the absolute _bullshit_ he’d gone through just to get Junkrat out of this hellhole. 

Roadhog raised his arm, pain making his head swim as it hit him again, and he finally managed to open his eyes. There was nothing in his hand. Slowly, he lowered his hand back to his pack and fumbled for the canister again. If he could just feel, with one fingertip, it would be so much easier. If he could just touch the metal, he’d know he had it, that it hadn’t fallen out in the collapse. 

He brought his hand back up above his face, trying to crane his neck around but, God, he was so  _stiff._

When his hand swam back into view, there was yellow, and he carefully maneuvered his fingertips to turn it around, and it slipped from his numb fingers. He was sure it would have made a clank when it hit, but he couldn’t hear it. 

Blood spattered into his mask, and Roadhog’s chest rumbled with a broken, gurgling growl. 

A shadow loomed over him, and he narrowed his eyes, waiting for the final blow.

Nothing came, and he took a shallow breath in. In a rush, he could inhale further, and he huffed harder. The familiar bitter taste of his gas canister filled his mouth, reopening his lungs and snapping his skeleton back into shape. 

Raodhog laughed, long and hard before striking out with the hook still clutched tight in his left hand. He hooked the person who apparently had jammed the canister back in properly for him. He rolled onto his knees and pulled, bringing his savior eye to eye with him. 

It was the man from before. Grey, with his pale eyes looking panicked and his gun up. 

Roadhog snorted and shoved the gun to the side just as it went off, and he lightly punched the man in his bare chest. 

“Thanks,” he rasped, thirsty and still feeling bloody  _wrecked,_ but  _alive._

The older Junker stared at him with a mix of resigned wonder and pain as he dropped his gun to hold the arm that was clearly very broken.

“Know where they’re keeping a kid named Junkrat?” Roadhog asked as he stooped to shove a piece of wall off of his scrap gun. The heavy piece of ceiling groaned as it fell back into place, and a slough of dust and other bits of plaster and metal slipped to the floor in a miniature crap slide, but he managed to wrestle the gun out before it became trapped or his hand was snagged—a sharp piece would’ve easily sheared it off had it had managed to fall.

“Nah,” Grey answered.

“Better piss off, then,” Roadhog told him, trying to remember the rough layout of the floors. There would be a staircase somewhere on the west side of the building. The floor creaked dangerously beneath his foot when he moved, and he stopped moving to stare at it appraisingly. Beneath the dust and metal remains, the cracked and stained tile looked like it was about to sag and give way.

Roadhog reloaded his gun with scrap, and a special gift from Junkrat. He backed up a few steps and then shot, carefully gauging the distance so that the little bomb exploded as it neared the weakened patch of floor. 

It wasn’t quite enough, and he stomped over, slamming his foot down. Not enough. He stood on the weak patch, testing, and then jumping just once. The floor caved, and he bent his knees as he crashed down to the ninth floor, absorbing the shock. 

Roadhog shot the first two sleeping Junkers he saw and hooked a third from across the room before any of the room’s occupants even had a chance to move. The hooked man had a decent looking shirt on, raising the odds he might know where else the brothers had been working. Hog slammed the metal-edged butt of his gun into the man’s temple. “Where’s the suits’ bitch?” he asked, low and calm, but clearly edging towards anger. 

“Don’t fuckin’ know—“

Hog blasted his face off and whipped around to hook another Junker, one of the few who had been able to grab a weapon and fire at him. When he was near enough, Hog released his hook to let it clang into the reel, he grabbed the man by the side of his face. Roadhog’s hand easily engulfed half of the Junker’s head. 

“Where’s the suits’ bitch?” he repeated.

“Y-Y’talkin’ about Scrapqueen?”

Hog gave the Junker’s head a squeeze, and the man let out a shrill noise before stumbling through a few more words. The only words Hog managed to pick out where “posh prosth—“ before he threw the man into his fellows, who’d begun shooting—wildly inaccurately—at him.

Roadhog pressed forward, shoving more ammo into his gun, and then pumping it into the pile of scrambling Junkers. A knife bit into his back, and he whirled around. His brass knuckles simply caved in the face of the man stupid enough to try a stunt like that. There were a few more Junkers left on the floor, and the last one turned tail and ran as he hooked the other Junker and fired his last shot into him.

Reloading his gun, he walked down the stairs towards where the last Junker had fled. 

Bullets peppered the metal as he moved heavily down the steps, and he waited patiently for the steady stream to cut off due to either reloading or curiosity. He was in no rush.

When one of the men came close enough, popping into view, Roadhog was already partially hidden in the shadows. His reach was long enough that he didn’t even need his hook to grab the man and hold him still enough to fill his face with scrap. 

As he moved down, he couldn’t remember how many more floors he had to go through, how many had fallen beneath him, how many he’d already cleared. All he knew was that so far, Junkrat hadn’t been on any of them, and Roadhog was  _angry._

_ _


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He still mad.

There was so much noise on the upper levels. There usually was, but this kind of ruckus made even the most hardened Junkers take a step towards the back tunnel leading out of the basement of the office building and flee into the rest of the ruined Omnium. 

Abruptly cut off screaming and yelling, the steady sound of a modified shotgun between reloads, more screaming that cut off without gunfire, then, treacherously, “The basement!” before silence.

It was the heavy steps on the stairway that prompted most of the Junkers to flee the scene. They weren’t paid enough to die like this. 

When Roadhog hit the last step leading to the basement, he was out of breath, and almost calm. Or, he was, until he saw something on the floor. It was bent and broken, a mangled mess of orange painted metal.

Rage boiled back up until he felt like the pressure was about to split him open. The same anger and fierce loathing he’d had for that Junker with the orange prosthetic, the one he’d caught sight of in Sydney, came crashing back and overwhelmed him all at once. And that rage was being directed to whoever had done this to… to  _his._

That’s the only word that was there. It wasn’t  _his_ employer anymore,  _his c_ harge,  _his_ annoyance. It wasn’t even  _his Junkrat._

A growl started deep in Roadhog’s chest that abruptly cut off when a heavy pipe crashed into the right side of his head. Dazed for only a moment, he quickly recovered and grabbed the offender by his face before slamming his head into the door jamb, the second time ended in a sickening crunch. 

“Bloody hell…” came a soft, female whisper from the middle of the room— the room where Junkrat hung from the ceiling by his left wrist, head lolling drastically to the side. So much so that Roadhog wondered if his neck was broken before he noticed the flash of metal. There was the woman—  _the_ woman who’d made that deal with him, Scrapqueen—using Junkrat as a shield. She stared at him with her good eye over Junkrat’s shoulder as if it had just occurred to her how terrifying Roadhog truly was.

“Drop the knife,” Roadhog told her, his breaths heaving with his bad lungs and his anger. He was so furious, but he couldn’t risk hurting Junkrat. Right now, though, all he wanted to do was rip her apart. He was going to.

“Ain’t a Buckley’s chance,” she sneered, pressing the knife closer. 

Junkrat jerked when the blade pressed into his skin, left eyelid dragging up to show a sliver of white. His brow furrowed, and he shifted his torso away from Scrapqueen. Not much, but enough to give Roadhog a narrow opening.

His hook was still clenched in his hand, and in a second it was soaring across the room, carving through the air to catch Scrapqueen in her back before she could slice Junkrat’s throat open. He yanked hard and she fought him the whole way, digging in her heels, trying to roll out of the firm set his hook had gotten into the meat of her back. When she was close enough she threw the knife at him desperately, the blade still wet with Junkrat’s blood. He dragged her in close enough and slammed his fist into her face. 

Roadhog punched her, again and again, continuing even after she’d stopped moving and hung limp in his grasp. He snarled and ripped off her prosthetic arm in one rough jerk and slammed it into the side of her head. Both broke in a shower of red and still shiny-new silver pieces. He stared for a moment, and then did it again.

The haze of rage slowly bled out of him, and Roadhog finally dropped Scrapqueen’s body. He turned away and took a few steps before his hook, still caught in Scrapqueen’s body, tugged at him. Cursing, he reluctantly turned his eyes away from Junkrat to unhook her.

When he turned back around, Junkrat’s head was up and he was staring at Roadhog.

Blood, dried and flaky, coated his right temple down to his cheek. With a sinking feeling, Roadhog realized it was the same deep cut at his hairline from when he’d slammed the sharp metal butt of his scrap gun into Junkrat’s head at the warehouse. His lips were chapped and busted up, blood still wetly dripping down his chin. His right eye was closed, though whether it was because it was because of the caked on blood or because there was something wrong with it, Roadhog couldn’t tell. His left eye was the one focused on Roadhog, lips turned up in a cheeky grin. 

“This again.” Junkrat’s voice was raspy and rough, and his little laugh came out sounding more like a cough. “Fuck  _me_ if I don’t get all kinds’a crazy lucy when I’m ripped on this shit,” he purred before closing his eye and his head dropped back down heavily onto his chest.

Roadhog stayed where he was. He wanted to rush over. He wanted to help, but he was frozen in place by the sight of the bruises, the cuts, the burns—there was a battery with cables twisting out of it, what looked and smelled like charred skin on the ends—and, God, the jut of his ribs through his grimy, bruised skin. His arm looked weird, and Hog slowly realized with a slightly sick feeling that it was dislocated at the shoulder.

He had only been there for  _two days._

_Didn’t take much to break that stupid little twat._

Junkrat’s left foot shifted on the ground slightly, and he pirouetted with a soft humming, followed by a broken giggle. His arm, unresponsive, reluctantly followed his body, twisted at an odd angle that made the chain holding him up creak.

“Junkrat—“ Roadhog started to tell him to stop, his tone slipping into that irritated growl he seemed to be constantly using with his employer, but Junkrat stopped moving so abruptly that the words died.  He twisted around quickly, like he hadn’t noticed that Roadhog was there and was seeing him for the first time.

“Fuck. _Fuck,_ that’s a good one. Sounds just alike, doesn’t have piglets suckling his tits anymore, ’s a bigger queer’n Kangaroo and Bangaboom combined!” He laughed and twisted around again. His right eye opened with some difficulty, and he surveyed the entire room, turning around in the middle of the space like a goddamned circus performer pivoting on the ball of his foot. 

“Where’d ol’ Scraphag go?” he asked, finally settling back down with both eyes on Roadhog now. It took only a second for his gaze to drop to the two dead bodies on the ground, and he grinned. “Well I can’t say I ain’t dreamed about it, but this’s a new lu.” He tittered and turned again before he sagged against the chain, studying Roadhog with his head cocked at that weird angle, like all the energy was suddenly gone from him.  Roadhog frowned and stepped closer, noticing the plastic tubing wrapped around and through the chain that bound Junkrat’s wrist. Whatever was inside was clear.

Roadhog’s eyes dropped to the shattered remains of Junkrat’s peg leg. The knee was totally fucked, and it looked like the rest of the mechanics had been strewn across the floor of the basement. Fuck, he was so tired. He felt it sinking in as he slumped towards Junkrat and began fiddling with the leather cuff attaching his arm to the chain. 

“Think I know what this’s about,” Junkrat slurred at him as Roadhog pressed against Junkrat to alleviate some of the pressure on the cuff. “Fuck, you reek like him, too.” Junkrat wrinkled his nose, but didn’t move away from where he was pressing into Roadhog’s chest.

It took a moment for Roadhog to notice the wetness against his skin, and when he finally got Junkrat’s arm unstrapped, he could hear sniffling and mumbling. Roadhog jerked the tubing, hard, pulling it free from whatever it was attached to in the ceiling. Liquid spilled across the floor as he held Junkrat, locating the needle that had been inserted into the crook of his arm and picking it out.

When Roadhog finally managed to tilt Junkrat’s head back, he saw the wetness on his chest wasn’t just blood. Tears and snot were streaking down Junkrat’s grimy, bloody face. 

“Just finish me off,” he said, voice too close to begging for Roadhog. “I ain’t gonna tell you anything. And I ain’t gonna shut up.”

_That little shit was broken just as soon as you handed him over._

“Finish it,” he whispered.  He hadn’t told them the secret.  They had just broken _him_.  Roadhog swallowed and shoved back the pain he felt burrowing up from deep down inside himself.  He’d shoved his feelings there for years, allowed hunger and bloodlust to take their place, to fill up all the cracks and crannies that Mako had allowed softer things to wriggle into and fester, and now it was coming back.  He couldn’t have that.

He lowered Junkrat down to the ground and pulled his eyelid back carefully. His left eye was unfocused and glazed over, pupil blown wide. Well, that was one way to try to keep Junkrat quiet.  Blow him out of his mind on whatever had been in those tubes.  Looked like it hadn’t worked.

Roadhog checked on his other wounds gingerly and paused at Junkrat’s shoulder, softly giving him a warning of, “s’gonna hurt” before he pulled his arm sharply. The shoulder made a raspy click as it slid back into place. Junkrat didn’t so much as whimper. He just kept talking.

On the bright side, if there was one, he’d moved on from begging to be killed. 

“Thought we was on good terms. Bein’ nicer ‘cause we was mates… movin’ toward not mates. But in the good way.” 

Roadhog couldn’t tell if Junkrat was talking to him, but he was certain he was talking  _about_ him. 

It was a fair assessment. Roadhog had been rather genial and inviting before he’d handed Junkrat over, and it had only made him more eager to shove his partner— this  _boy—_ into different hands. He’d  _enjoyed_ being nice.  The delighted look Junkrat got when Roadhog had given him the first choice of rations, telling him to drink more water or booze when he would normally have smacked the back of his head and told him to conserve it, that look had made him feel warmth.  Roadhog _wasn’t_ nice.  Roadhog _wasn’t_ warm.

Shaking the thought from his head, Roadhog continued checking over Junkrat carefully. His fingertips skimmed gently over the worst areas to make sure they weren’t too tender for when he’d have to inevitably move Junkrat again, but it was hard to tell when he was starting to make less sense with every passing second. He couldn’t understand the words that spilled from the other man’s mouth. The tears hadn’t stopped, and as he spoke Roadhog could see that he was missing a tooth. A top premolar, right behind his canine. 

Roadhog pulled a cloth from the pouch at his waist and ripped a piece off. Not bothering to be gentle, he stuffed it into Junkrat’s mouth and shoved it up against the raw gum. It seemed pretty new, still bleeding, and Junkrat whimpered when Roadhog forced his jaw to close on the fabric. 

With a quiet sigh, Roadhog checked what scrap he had left. He’d had to stop pumping Junkers full of scrap willy-nilly when he’d noticed he was running out. He had just enough to carry them through two more reloads and one more of Junkrat’s little scrap bombs.

Roadhog gently, carefully gathered Junkrat’s battered body into his arms and shifted him carefully so he was cradled by his left arm, leaving his right hand clenched around his gun, even if it was just to brandish it.

Slowly, he walked them back towards the stairs that led up to the ground floor. As he passed through the door, one of his knees buckled underneath him. Roadhog glanced back, to see if he had stumbled on Scrapqueen’s body, or one of her henchmen’s, but they were at least a meter away from him, off to the side. 

Slowly, Roadhog allowed his other knee to bend with a frown until his ass was on the ground, and he had to shift around to lean back against the wall. 

Fatigue, relief and worry flooded him all at once. Blood streaked his body so much he couldn’t tell what was his, or what wounds were bleeding, but he had to assume that this dizzy, bone-deep tiredness was related to something  _bad_ getting hit again.

A few seconds passed, and he started to physically feel again. Roadhog sucked in a sharp breath, squeezing Junkrat tightly as the waves of pain coursed over him with every newly realized graze and bullet hole. 

Roadhog shivered as the pain passed, a cold sweat breaking out on his brow even though it was well over ninety degrees in the basement. 

At least he knew what dying felt like.

“Hurts,” he heard Junkrat mumble. 

“Sorry,” Roadhog muttered, and forced himself to unclamp his arm from around Junkrat, though he just wanted to cling to him, keep him close. “Fuck. M’so sorry…” he whispered, leaning his head back against the wall and closing his eyes. 

“Sorry?” Junkrat lifted his head slightly, slumping less against Roadhog’s chest and halfway sitting up for almost a second before he fell back again.

Roadhog grunted, but he couldn’t tell if he was able to form words anymore. Junkrat shoved himself back away again, and Roadhog could feel those eyes on him.

“Sorry for what, you big piece of—“ Junkrat cut himself off in one of his colorful curses, falling back from Hog’s lap.

Roadhog reached for him, but his hand closed on nothing. He made a discontented noise, but was suddenly hit with the feeling that really he couldn’t be assed to breathe, much less try and wrangle Junkrat so he’d stay out of trouble for five goddamn seconds after his rescue. 

Which was  _supposed_ to be still in progress.

Roadhog slowly dragged his eyes open and forced air in and out of his lungs. Junkrat swam into focus, where he was crawling across the scrap-strewn floor towards the collection of torture devices and a medical stand of IV bags. Half of the bags were empty at this point from Roadhog yanking at the plastic tube.

Blearily, Roadhog watched as Junkrat somehow managed to army crawl with surprising dexterity for a high, beaten, and starved man who was currently missing half his limbs. It was a bit more of a wobbly path than a straight one, but Roadhog was willing to give him this one because he was very determined to get to something from beneath a table full of sharp, bloody implements. 

“Still ‘ere!” Junkrat squealed around the rag in his mouth, and he rolled over onto his back before starting the shaky, uneven journey back over to Roadhog. Once he saw that mode of transport was going too slow he rolled back over, and resumed crawling back with a yellow metal canister clutched tight in his fist.

Roadhog watched in absolute wonder as Junkrat slowly, distractedly,  _barely_ made it back to him and managed to pull himself into Roadhog’s lap again. 

“Christ, everything hurts,” Junkrat said, and now Roadhog could see that his torso was littered in new cuts from dragging himself across all the scrap on the floor from his peg leg. Roadhog stared Junkrat right in the eye as he raised the canister to Hog’s filter and, missing twice, managed to insert it.

One breath, and Roadhog felt his strength return to him, and with it his resolve to get Junkrat out of the Omnium. Hell, out of  _Australia,_ find him a safe place to build his damn bombs and mumble under his breath manically in peace, without this third-rate junker scum constantly trying to take him out or steal his shit. 

Roadhog grabbed Junkrat before he could squirm away, and flipped him over on his back like a cockroach, his left arm creating a cradle for the little shit. Junkrat stopped fighting.  As Roadhog stood, Junkrat’s left foot scraped against the floor and he stared up at Hog in clouded wonder. Realization slowly dawned on his face, his eyes opening wide—well, as wide as the right would go with how swollen it was—and his ever-expressive eyebrows moved in and up on his forehead. 

“S’not a dream, Hog?” he asked, clutching Roadhog’s vest with his hand.

Roadhog didn’t answer him, just started forward again with Junkrat cradled in his left arm and his scrap gun loaded and ready in his right. 

He mounted the stairs back up to the ground floor, ready for another fight in a day that felt like nothing but a long string of fights.

Roadhog saw the number and variety of guns he expected to greet them, but they weren’t in Junkers’ hands. The men and women still left alive in the office building had their guns holstered, or just tossed on the ground. Roadhog huffed and walked slowly through the smattering of people. His back itched from all the eyes on it, all the shots they could potentially take to finally kill him, but it never happened.

Every Junker he saw outside the office building followed the same peacekeeping strategy. Weapons were kept carefully holstered and people went about their business, or they set their weapons down entirely with palms up. 

_Not a threat._

There was an eerie silence across the town. The noises of the frackers down in the pit echoed around the buildings, and those few who continued to do their business despite the carnage a hundred meters away made soft sounds in the heavy silence.

He huffed again, and shifted Junkrat up a little before continuing his walk towards the entrance. The gun in his hand was still out and ready for anyone who lost their shit enough to try something. Part of him hoped someone would. Part of him still wanted to rip all of them apart, limb from limb, piece by piece until there was nothing left but him and Junkrat in this shitty place.

But he had to get Junkrat to safety. More bullets and firefights wouldn’t help that.

The bike was exactly where Roadhog had left it, and he plopped Junkrat down and leaned him against the searing metal of the gas tank for a second. He dug around until he pulled out one of the old canteens of water for both of them. He drained a quarter of the canteen himself before he heard a soft thud. Junkrat had slid sideways to flop bonelessly in the dust, and Roadhog hurried around to turn him back over, try and get some water into him.

The second the water touched his lips, Junkrat spluttered and spat at Roadhog. A weak punch hit him in the snout of his mask, which only made Roadhog chuckle and hold Junkrat down harder. Carefully, he shoved one knee on Junkrat’s chest and pinned the flailing left arm to his side with one hand, the other reaching out and pouring more water into Junkrat’s mouth.

There was an angry gurgle before Junkrat finally gulped the water down, a slightly more approving noise escaping him. 

Roadhog carefully poured a little more water into his mouth before capping the canteen and hauling Junkrat up as he stood.

Roadhog hiked his leg over the bike and settled Junkrat in front of him, keeping one arm around his waist to hold him still, but Junkrat just wiggled and whined and asked for more water, more water or to just kill him, please.

With a low growl, Roadhog put his hands on Junkrat’s hips and lifted him again, moving him back into the cradle of his left arm. Junkrat’s leg lolled down by Roadhog’s, and Hog carefully pulled it up so it wouldn’t get burned by the engine, tucking Junkrat’s heel to catch on Roadhog’s thigh.

Once he felt like they were settled enough, Roadhog kicked the bike to life and drove one handed out of the Omnium’s shitty joke of a parking lot and into the wrecked wasteland they called their home. He angled them North North West, and tried to avoid the worst of the bumps for Junkrat’s sake. He knew Bangaroo had a store of army surplus nearby, and all of Bangaroo’s stock—medical aid, food, cloth goods—just so happened to be under new ownership.

:::::

The warehouse was well guarded. It was an old schoolhouse with a patched fence running the perimeter of the brick building, barbed wire coiled at the top. Bangaroo wasn’t a pushover, even if he was absolute shit at aiming a damn gun. From all of Roadhog’s previous experience with the twins, he knew there had to be at least one automatic turret set up around the perimeter, and Bangaroo usually kept at least four or five guys around his goods.

Roadhog had counted ten so far. 

Junkrat was still asleep, laid out under the bike and some brush. Roadhog had put him in the shade as much as possible, but the sun brightly reflecting through the dingy green of the radiation clouds wouldn’t be their biggest problem soon enough. Once the sun went down, the desert got cold and deadly fast.

Roadhog didn’t see any other option but to approach the warehouse completely out in the open. His ammo bag was full of scrap again and there were three more gas canisters in the pouch on his hip. Shouts rang out across the compound, and he took a deep breath. 

The chain lock on the front gate disintegrated when he shot it point-blank with his scrap gun. He reloaded immediately while he had the chance, and soon enough bullets peppered the ground around him. The crack of a rifle echoed off the brick walls of the school, and he ducked instinctively at the sharp sound of a high powered bullet ripping through the fence behind him. 

Roadhog ran up close to the building, avoiding the sniper and waiting patiently for the guards to come to him. He knew they would, because he wasn’t giving them any other choice. 

Three of them were dead before they stopped rushing at him blindly and decided to get a little more crafty. A shift of a boot on stone reached him, coming from over his head, and he arced his hook towards the sound. Yanking, he felt the hook catch on something soft past the lip of the roof. One more yank, and two men tumbled into the dirt, one having bowled the other over on his way down. The hooked one’s neck snapped on his uncontrolled landing, while the other, smothered under his mate’s still-kicking corpse, turned over as best he could in the tangle. He managed to get his gun up to point at Roadhog just in time for him to simply shoot him in the face. 

Snorting, he turned to walk around the corner, make his location harder to pinpoint. Can’t make it too easy on them. That was half of them down. Five more and a turret, then he and Junkrat could set up shop here until he’d recovered. 

Roadhog found the cracked window into a basement of the main building, and peered through it. Junkrat would’ve been able to squeeze in, but there was no way for Roadhog to pull it off. He moved on, and found a side door with no outside handle on it. 

Roadhog studied the door for a moment. He took his hook and dug the sharp tip between the door and the jamb. It creaked and groaned, but it didn’t pop open. With a sigh, Roadhog shot the locking mechanism twice before trying again and with a clanging, screeching gasp, the door finally shifted enough to get his hands into and pull. 

The door popped open with a creak, and when it resisted, Roadhog didn’t hesitate to simply bend the door with his strength. The metal buckled and he wrestled his shoulder into the door, shoving hard. 

It opened to a dimly lit hall, and upon closer inspection, Roadhog noticed it was actually a single room and the walls were  _made_ of boxes upon boxes of supplies. 

Roadhog looked back at the door he’d just pried open and saw it was originally an emergency exit. His boots echoed oddly against the floor, but in a surprisingly familiar way. Wooden slats, still covered in layers of varnish like any good gym floor, gave Roadhog a wave of nostalgia at being on a basketball court again.

Walking forward, his steps sounded like he was trying to stomp his way through the floor. There just wasn’t any way to walk quietly across the floor in boots, and it was a good defensive tactic to employ when trying to keep people from sneaking up on you and taking all your shit. Provided, of course, those people were the type who died from fewer than three bullets. 

Roadhog wasn’t that type, and didn’t particularly care about stealth or getting in and out without trouble. He was there to take the whole base.

So he did.

When he was done, the mangled and scrap riddled turret beeped brokenly as Roadhog walked over the bloody, scrapped bodies littering the floor. Bits of machinery and parts of the turret were everywhere; it was a mound of decent scrap, and probably had enough parts to help Junkrat get started on constructing a new leg and arm. 

Roadhog took the time to bolt down one of the army cots to the floor before he went to retrieve Junkrat from the bike. The sun had begun to set, and, as it did, the air started to cool. It had dropped at least five degrees in the hour since Roadhog had left Junkrat and gone to secure their hideout. 

Gently, he set Junkrat on the cot and pulled a pair of pilfered handcuffs from his pocket, turning him so he could cuff Junkrat’s bruised and swollen wrist to the metal support of the cot. He paused, staring.

Junkrat’s wrist was a deep purple and black all the way around. The handcuffs would only constrict it and irritate the swelling already making it look misshapen. 

Roadhog cuffed him by his left ankle instead and wandered back out for his bike and to start the cleanup. 

The bodies were tossed just outside of the chain-link gate, and Roadhog redid the chain on the entrance with a pilfered quick link so they were maybe a little more secure. He buried a mine in front of the gate, just in case some dipshit thought they were going to be clever and try to go over the only unbarbed bit of fence or break the lock. 

Once they had a safe perimeter for the night, Roadhog started working on fixing Junkrat up. With a bottle of water and a cloth, he started to clean away the grime and blood from his wounds. He started with Junkrat’s head and face, ending with his bare left foot that was raw and ragged from balancing and scraping against the rough, sharp ground. Roadhog took care in disinfecting and bandaging the wounds. He didn’t need to worry about running out. He hadn’t even gone through three boxes yet and already had more than enough medical supplies for Junkrat’s full recovery. 

Junkrat’s fingers twitched when Roadhog splinted his wrist and strapped cold compresses to it to get the swelling to go down, but he didn’t wake up. 

Roadhog sat back and breathed out a sigh. He thought he was done, until the soft drip-drip drew his attention to blood underneath the metal cot. Carefully, he turned Junkrat over. The younger man made a high-pitched noise of pain, and Roadhog muttered a guttural apology that was too soft, too frank for him to be comfortable with. 

Deep welts covered Junkrat’s back, red and raised, irritated by dirt and blood and grit. Two particularly deep and nasty scratches sliced across from the bottom of his left shoulder blade around to his ribs. Seven cuts were dug into the lower meat of his back, four fairly straight ones with another slashing through them, with two more uneven, jagged cuts on the side that were still bleeding freely. 

Roadhog grabbed a new cloth and pressed it firmly to the fresh wound, feeling numb and near-worthless for allowing all of this to happen. Or maybe it was that he was so pathetic and weak as to break down and go back for Junkrat in the end. 

All that anger he’d felt in the past day was gone, and he just felt exhausted and numb. 

He’d only felt like this once before. A lifetime ago, in a wrecked little house in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by blood. 

Roadhog shook his head, stopping the memories and forcing himself to reorient in the present. What he really needed to do was set something up that would help flush the drugs out of Junkrat’s system and get him rehydrated. 

It took a while, but Roadhog finished patching up Junkrat’s back before he rolled him back over and double-checked that the wound at his temple hadn’t reopened. Without thinking, he brushed the grimy blonde hair back gently and tried not to dwell on the fact he’d probably never get that close to Junkrat again. 

There was a bag of saline stashed in one of the saddlebags on his chopper, and he set it up in what was probably the correct way. Maybe.

Roadhog dug through more boxes and found plenty of food, enough MREs to last them a fucking month in one crate alone. The whole place was filled with boxes and crates. Roadhog set two meals next to the cot, along with a canteen of water. 

Then, he sat and waited. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note: we weren’t able to find any Aussie slang for hallucination, so we made up our own, which is what “lucy” and “lu” were in Junkrat’s dialogue.


	8. Chapter 8

The pain was what woke Junkrat up. 

It was what usually woke him up, but this was different. The deep ache all over, the throbbing through his back and shoulders, it was maddening.   He was still completely disoriented, and maybe that’s why he felt like he was a second away from finding the nearest goddamned gun and blowing his fucking head off just to stop the pain.  If he could just get his arms loose, he’d end it all.  He shifted, and his back sharply protested. Maybe he could push himself back upright with his foot, adjust the way he was leaning and stretch a little, but his toes pressed against air rather than rough concrete and metal shards. 

It didn’t make sense, and his arm—he could feel his arm again. His wrist hurt like a goddamned motherfucker. He brought it up— up from his side? It hit Junkrat then that he was lying down on what felt like some kind of cot. 

His wrist forgotten, Junkrat opened his eyes, giving a muffled hiss at the harsh light that hit them from high windows. There was cloth in his mouth; it was tacky and tasted like copper.  He tried to work it out of his mouth with his tongue, but he just couldn’t get it.  He stiffly reached into his mouth with his fore- and middle fingers and pulled out a strip of cloth.  It had been ripped from something and packed back into his mouth to stem the bleeding of his missing tooth.  He groaned, his throat feeling dry and blood-logged.  He tossed the strip to the side and brought his hand back up to rub at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, then his temple. His fingers were stiff, but at least they worked.

There was the smell of antiseptic now, the dull tang of medical salve. Junkrat shifted to sit up, but his ankle was pulled to a stop by a short pair of handcuffs secured to the bed. He tried to reach for them with his right arm.  Maybe he could break them, but his prosthetic—

Junkrat whined in belated mourning for his perfect right arm. He’d spent ages tweaking it just right, and in just a few minutes those fucking twins had wrecked his most prized possession. Pissing poofters. 

Gingerly, Junkrat lay back down with a sigh. He’d exhausted himself, and he’d just woken up. There was a splint around his wrist, an IV tube in the crook of his left arm, and he had bandages… well, felt like pretty much everywhere. 

What the actual, ever-loving fuck?

He tried to calm down, forcing down a few deep breaths, but it didn’t help much. It was either another hallucination, or it was a trick. Or both. Maybe he was high again, shit—he quickly ripped the IV from his arm. Maybe they were trying to get him to talk by putting him through hell and then acting all sweet. 

That’s what this felt like. Nice clean wounds, a cot instead of strung up over the hard floor, and—holy shit there was food. 

Junkrat snagged one of the thick plastic packages and ripped it open. His muscles screamed at him as he sat up, but fuck that, there was food, and—

He paused as the inner packages tumbled to the cot between his thighs. A trick. This was just a trick. Junkrat’s stomach growled, and he made a fierce, disgusted noise at himself. Forcing his arm to move, he shoved the food off of the cot and pulled his knee up, scooting closer to the end of the end of the cot and resting his forehead against it as he forced himself to breathe. He hurt. He was hungry. There was a canteen next to the other MRE package, but if the food was a trick, then so was the water. 

A door opened, somewhere past all the boxes that filled the room he was being held in—the Omnium never had a room like this.  Where did it come from?—and he wondered if he should just lie back down and play dead. 

Shifting, he looked down at the accessory package with its little plastic spork and knife, the matches, salt and pepper, and some kind of packet. He flicked it off the edge of the cot to join the rest on the ground and scooted back to let his leg straighten again.  He crossed his arms over his chest, kept his chin up and stared hard in the direction the noise had come from. 

There was a very clever string of expletives and insults already mapped out in his head for Scraphag, Bangabro, Kangabitch, whoever rounded that corner, and it all died in his throat and just sat there in a painfully hard knot when Roadhog rounded around a tall stack of boxes.  His arms dropped and his chest _hurt_.

It wasn’t until he heard it echo around the high ceilinged room that Junkrat realized he’d said anything at all.  The word hung heavily between them. Roadhog—or whatever this was, a hallucination, a nightmare, a fucking fever dream—tilted his head to the side and walked toward him slowly. Carefully. 

Fury was in Junkrat’s throat, and it was enough for tears to swim in his eyes, but he snarled and forced them back with several hard blinks.

“Ain’t no way this is happening. Ain’t no way that shitty bitch-ass cunt would come back for me, we’ve been through this already. Not after… there just ain’t no way. Punch me awake, Fuckaroo, ‘cause I’m fucking done with this fucked up luce. Again. How many of these do I fucking get? ‘cause I already _know_ he ain’t comin’ back,” he bit out the last word bitterly and clenched his fist against the stiff cot beneath him.

The giant stupid lump that was supposed to be Roadhog just stared at him for a moment before turning away and continuing to drag a toolbox— it used to be their shared toolbox, it wasn’t anymore it couldn’t be—into the center of the room. 

Junkrat looked around desperately, but everything that might have been useable near him had been shoved out of the way. There was nothing he could use as a weapon, and Junkrat had once killed a guy with a pillow. 

He grumbled under his breath. Expletives, grounding phrases he used when he wasn’t sure if something was real—usually, if he was breaking down, they sounded funny—but nothing worked. He was still there, still handcuffed to a bloodstained cot, and Roadhog had settled down to stare at him with his soulless traitor eyes. 

“What the fuck?” he finally asked. 

“You got kidnapped,” Roadhog told him, pointblank. 

Junkrat considered it. He wanted it to be true, more than he wanted to admit, but there was no way. He’d been through too much fucking shit in the past week to fall for that one. 

“Me memory’s shit, but there’s no way that’s going to fucking work you dicksnorting useless bag of cuntswallow.” Junkrat peered around him a little more with a scoff that was half growl. “The fuck are we?”

“One of Bangaroo’s warehou—“

“Crikey, what’s that shit, you do a full fucking turncoat this time?”

Junkrat hadn’t meant to ask like that, hadn’t meant to be staring at Roadhog with wide eyes full of hurt, but the thought of Roadhog working for—working for them and not just taking the money— those gross piece of shit brothers was just—

“I ain’t telling you shit,” Junkrat said firmly, grabbing the utensil package from the MRE and throwing it at Roadhog. The too-light plastic package fluttered to the ground a good foot from its target. 

Junkrat snarled and leaned down to snag more pieces of the packaged meal. This time, the package he threw hit Roadhog in the stomach, and the next hit the mask—right on the nose—and the next, Roadhog finally sighed and simply leaned to the side, letting it sail past his head. Any elation Junkrat felt at being able to hit Roadhog drained away, and he moved to stand, charge forward and do some real damage. His leg yanked to a halt with the cuffs, still firmly shackled to the cot’s leg, and without any prosthetic to catch himself on he fell flat on his face.

“Gonna fucking kill you, you shitheaded two-faced son of a bitch, gonna tear your dicklaced cunting head off you scuzzlicking fatass—“

Roadhog only chuckled, and that just served to make Junkrat angier. He yanked at the handcuffs, yanked at the cot, a high noise catching at the back of his throat as he hauled and tugged and it was useless, he was helpless, he just wanted this to be a hallucination, please. Hog couldn’t—wouldn’t have come back for him because he’d been traded for a giant stupid fuckoff bag of money and that would always be better than him.

Junkrat didn’t know when he’d started hitting his forehead on the edge of the cot, but he realized he was doing it when a meaty hand slipped between his bleeding temple and the metal frame.

Snarling, Junkrat shoved at Roadhog’s hand, his arm, telling him to fuck off, go away, this was all his fault why the fuck would he bother coming back—he still wasn’t convinced he did, that he _would_ —should’ve just killed him, or done the world a favor and done himself in. Yeah, that would’ve saved everyone a bunch of time and energy and give-a-shits—

Roadhog sighed the sigh that meant he was getting tired of Junkrat’s tantrum, and Junkrat glared at him and balled up his fist to wind up and sock the fucker right in the face. Roadhog didn’t retaliate at all, just kept his hand hovering nearby in case Junkrat started to hurt himself again.

“Whatever,” Junkrat growled, punching him again.

This time, Roadhog’s hand flinched towards the blow but he didn’t stop it, he took it, and his hand stayed ready for Junkrat, who was having none of it.

“What, they pay you to keep me alive?” he snapped, acid in his words.

There was a long pause, a long silence, like Roadhog was trying to figure out if he should lie or not— and Junkrat knew that silence real well, he could tell—but then he just shrugged and said simply, “they’re dead.”

“… Come again?” Junkrat’s brows dropped low, and he narrowed his eyes. There were… memories, he guessed, a knife held to his throat, Scraphag sounding desperate, the rattle of chain, a bang, silence…

“I killed them. The twins, most of the Junkers in the main office building, and Scrapqueen,” Roadhog told him, his words slow and measured.

“Wait, wait a second. So, you’re telling me that you, Roadhog, traitorous dickbag extraordinaire, sold me out for a whoppin’ big bag of cash, waited a week, then came back and slaughtered near everyone in the Omnium?” He’s not sure if he’s mad or impressed or sick. Probably all three, with maybe a little more impressed than was strictly necessary. 

“Junkrat,” Roadhog said slowly, “you were only there two days.”

“The fuck I was!” Junkrat wanted to stand again, he wanted to pace and yell and throw punches and throw things and scream and blow things up. He wanted a fight, and he wanted it right now.

Two days. What the fuck ever, he’d been there for seven goddamned days and he’d flopped between a mind-numbing state of boredom and pain-fucked for the whole goddamn thing.

“Two days,” Roadhog repeated.

“There’s no way I was only there for—“

“Two. Days,” Roadhog insisted.

“Ain’t no way!” Junkrat’s voice rose an octave and he slapped at Roadhog’s hovering hand, then his arm, his face, and then Junkrat hauled back and punched him in the face again. He wanted to do more, wanted to kick him, wanted to drive his heel into Roadhog’s jewels and grind down, something that might make him tell the truth, anything to get him to stop fucking lying about something so pointless. It was stupid to lie about this. How would him being held in Junkertown for two days help that Roadhog had sold him out in the first place? It wouldn’t. It didn’t make anything better, it just proved that Roadhog was a piece of shit, they’d never been mates, and Junkrat was a fool for ever trusting him. 

Roadhog sat silently while Junkrat chased circles around his head. Thought after thought fell into place, and he reluctantly conceded that, yeah, fine, he didn’t feel like he’d been starved for a  whole week. But that might not mean anything. There were plenty of empty patches in his memory. They could’ve fed him at some point. Unlikely, but not impossible. 

“Just… Just fuck off,” he said finally, turning away from Roadhog and curling up tight around his legs. “Doesn’t matter how long it was, you’re a piece of shit and I fuckin’ hate you,” he hissed, arms gripped tightly around his thighs. 

A muffled sigh, then, “fair enough.” 

He heard a grunt as Roadhog stood, and the heavy tread of his boots as he walked away. 

Junkrat tried, he really did, but tears dripped down his face and his shoulders shook. He’d trusted Roadhog. He’d known better, at first, but then—

He’d seen the whirl of chaos and destruction Roadhog could leave. He thought they’d seen eye to eye on that, that they’d enjoyed tearing shit up wherever they went. He’d been saved by Roadhog more times than he could remember. 

He’d fucking _loved_ that fat bastard.

Everything fucking hurt. 


	9. Chapter 9

Junkrat sat with his left leg curled beneath him, and the remains of his right leg beside him on the cot. “Trying to see what’s salvageable,” he’d lied to Roadhog. It was easy.  Any insincerity was covered with a sneer and a bitter, “make sure you don’t turn on me once I get meself working again.”

One of the slender rods that had provided support on the locking joint of his knee was gripped tightly in his hand, the metal prong was slick against his damp palm. He was trying to act casual, just in case Roadhog came back, but he knew there was no way he could pull off acting innocent. He felt the same way he had ever since he’d woken up the previous day: manic, on edge, ready to fucking blow shit up and kill a few people. Odds were, that’s probably how he looked, too.

Junkrat glanced over his shoulder as the pin slipped sharply to the side in the handcuffs’ keyhole. He jerked his ankle, but nothing happened.  The lock stayed locked. Junkrat made a strained noise in the back of his throat before just jamming it deeper and working it back and forth. After a few moments, there was a snap from within. He grinned and yanked on his leg again, but the handcuffs still held tight.  Again.

Grumbling and cursing, Junkrat pulled the small piece of metal from the hole to see he’d broken his makeshift tool instead.

Frustration welled up, hot and sharp, inside Junkrat’s throat. He bit down on his cheek until he tasted blood, and forced himself to take a deep, angry breath.

More than one way to fuck a hole, right?

Junkrat studied the pin thoughtfully before flipping it around and carefully studying the less twisted and fucked up side of the piece. It was probably flat enough to work as a shim. Carefully, Junkrat pushed the pin between the locking mechanism and the teeth. It slipped at first, but his second try got it properly wedged in. Carefully, very carefully, he held it there with his thumb at the other end and pressed on the cuffs to tighten them with his middle finger, just one click. The locking mechanism caught on the narrow shim and clicked open. Junkrat scrambled forward, off the cot and away from those piece of shit handcuffs. He fell, overbalancing without his prosthetic leg, and his wrist hit the hard wood floor.  He had to bite his tongue to keep from screaming. Godfucking shitdicking _tits_ that fucking _hurt._

But, he was free and he was _gone._ Junkrat used his elbow to shove up onto his knee and stump. He took a moment to balance before using a combination of core strength and sheer pigheaded stubbornness to lurch upright onto his left foot, balancing carefully against the wall with his arm.

The cuts on the bottom of his foot hurt like hell. It was almost enough to make him regret kicking Bangaroo in the nuts with his scrap-covered boot, but honestly, it was worth it even if he lost a few toes to gangrene. Though, thanks to Roadhog—or _not thanks_ to Roadhog because _fuck him—_ that was pretty unlikely.

Junkrat rested his hand on his hip, working out the kinks in balancing before peering around. He hopped over to the pile of MREs he’d seen Roadhog eat from, ignoring the protests from his foot and his ribs and basically every part of him. He grabbed one of the bags and ripped it open, tossing the entrée. It was too much effort, he didn’t have the time for that shit.  He did have time to rip open the bread package, though, and scarfed down what he could while still moving. The stale bread hurt like an absolute cunt on his ripped-out tooth, so he tried to gingerly chew on his left side, but his mouth was dry, and it was an ordeal in and of itself.  When he swallowed, the bread sat heavily in his empty stomach. It was uncomfortable, but it was also better than nothing.

Junkrat grabbed a bloodstained bug-out bag, still fully packed from when one of Bangaroo’s lackeys had been alive. He parsed through it a little before shrugging and looping it over his shoulder, wincing as it hit the heavy bruises and the still-tender welts. Food, bandages, some sort of booze. Pretty standard stuff, really.

His next target was the collection of miscellaneous cleaning supplies. It seemed like a weird thing out here, but then he considered that it had been Bangaroo’s place and, nah, it made sense.

“At least the scrubbed up cunt was worth somethin’ in death,” he muttered to himself as he grabbed two brooms and snapped the bristled ends off. He wobbled, almost losing his balance, but he corrected himself, managing to get the correct leverage and balance for the solid hits he needed to get the wood to break. Once he had the pieces he needed, he snapped one of them in half again, then snagged a roll of duct tape to fashion himself a makeshift crutch.

Of course, just as he started to test how well the crutch would support him, the door opened.

The crutch in question creaked and one of the supports slipped, but there were boots sounding on the wooden floor and it was _bloody good enough._ He hurried forward with the bag strapped tightly to his back and scrambled to get around some boxes to block him from Roadhog’s view.

There was the telltale clinking of Roadhog’s chain getting closer and closer, and Junkrat shifted backwards to try and hide behind more boxes.  The clatter of the broom handle on the polished floor slats echoed sharply. The chain and boots stopped.  Junkrat felt like he could hear Roadhog’s attention swivel from the empty cot to the stack of boxes he was hidden behind. Soon, the sound of his swinging chain and the shift of heavy boots pivoting on the varnished wood made it even clearer. Then, Roadhog was moving again.

Junkrat was moving, too.  Already planning an escape route when a thick hand grabbed the bag strapped to his back. Tamping down panic, Junkrat slipped his arms free and let his crutch clatter to the ground. He scrambled, pretty sure he could make it over the two rows of crates separating him from the door, or at least put enough distance between them that—

The glass made a loud thunk as it was dropped and then large, coarse hands grabbed him.  Junkrat growled and spat and fought the whole way, punching and kicking as Roadhog dragged him back out from behind the crates and hauled him back toward the cot. It got jolted several times by Junkrat’s furious resistance, and he heard the remnants of his leg hit the gym floor with a sharp, metallic clacking noise before he was finally wrestled down onto the bed.

Junkrat felt the frustration swell back up to engulf his chest as Roadhog pushed him down against the cot with one hand and easily fastened the cuff back around his thrashing ankle— _Roadhog’s right hand pinning him, his left hand wrapped around Junkrat’s prosthetic.  He was wrenching it and it_ hurt _it hurt like a_ motherfucker _and Junkrat just wanted him to_ fuck off _.  They cursed at each other, spat hard words and Junkrat had almost made the fatal mistake of kicking Roadhog in the nethers, but in the end… In the end, Junkrat had taken off his arm, had let Roadhog clean his infected stump.  He’d trusted him.  Asked him later if he wanted to stick together.  Thought that no answer was a good answer.  It wasn’t a “fuck off,” or a, “no.”_

Junkrat’s left hand flailed outward, grasping around and down to curl around the useless husk of his prosthetic.  He couldn’t believe he’d ever trusted the piece of shit chaining him to the bed.

He brought it up and slammed it into Hog’s head, blood immediately beginning to flow from his temple. Junkrat drew the prosthetic back to slam it forward again, a sneer carving across his face as he finally felt a little closer to right.

Roadhog grabbed his arm and tugged the useless hunk of metal and plastic from him.

Junkrat expected Roadhog to hit him back with it. Hell, he wanted him to, needed to feel something other than repeated failure and uselessness. The satisfaction that Roadhog was just as big a piece of shit as Junkrat _knew_ he was… he just wanted that. _Needed_ that.

Roadhog tossed the hunk of broken and shattered mechanics over to lie with his own equipment, well out of Junkrat’s cuffed reach.

“What, you afraid to hit a cripple now?” Junkrat snarled, jerking his arm out of Roadhog’s grasp and throwing a punch at him. Roadhog didn’t do anything to prevent it. Didn’t even move.

Fucking _useless_ sack of flaming dingo shit.

“I hate you,” Junkrat snapped, punching Roadhog in the face again.

“I know,” Roadhog rumbled.

“Then fucking let me go,” Junkrat demanded, taking a fierce grip on the leather of the mask’s nose and sneering into the dark lenses. “Or at least don’t keep me chained up like some fucking sick dog.”

“You can escape when you’re healed up and don’t need broken brooms to help you escape,” Roadhog told him, brushing his hands off before standing and walking over to kick the gnarled mess of wood and tape pointedly further behind the boxes Junkrat had been using as cover.

It hadn’t exactly been his best work.

Junkrat scoffed and crossed his arms. “If I ain’t escaping until then, at least fucking unchain me.”

“Will, once I’m sure you’re not going to kill me in my sleep,” damn fucking right he would, he was going to take that first chance he got—“Or take all the pills you can find and off yourself,” Roadhog rumbled, carefully combing the radius of Junkrat’s reach from the cot, making sure all he had was the single remaining MRE package and the full canteen of water.

Okay, so maybe that last one had been on his mind yesterday but, in his defense, there was probably some really good shit in those red and white crates. He knew that even before Roadhog had tossed him a bottle with two pissy little pain pills in it and a giant antibiotic. Now, with his pain being managed every six hours, overdosing into a stupor was a bit less appealing. It did top having to stare at pig face all day, though.

Roadhog leaned over and picked up Junkrat’s canteen, unscrewing the lid and hitching a thumb beneath his mask to take a draught. He didn’t drink much, but it was enough that it left a wet trail down his chin.

Junkrat glared as he recapped the canteen. That was _his_ water.

Roadhog’s lip curled as he lowered his mask and tossed the canteen at Junkrat, who caught it with an annoyed sneer.

“Not poisoned.”

“Not _yours,”_ Junkrat hissed, uncapping the water himself and licking his chapped lips. His tongue was dry enough that it had developed the consistency of sandpaper.

Hog gathered the bits of the MRE that Junkrat had left tossed around on the ground, and carefully piled them next to the unopened meal package sitting beside where the canteen used to be.

Junkrat tried not to drink too eagerly, but the tepid water was _divine._ He greedily chugged from the canteen, gulping until Roadhog pulled it away from him, sloshing water down his front and making Junkrat hiss in rage.

“Too fast and you’ll just chuck it back up,” Roadhog told him.

“Go fuck yourself,” Junkrat replied, grabbing the canteen and taking a single, controlled slurp before putting the cap back on and holding it in his lap, his arm wrapped around it protectively.

Roadhog snorted, but had the good sense to back off. “Eat something, too,” he instructed.

“Eat your mum’s ass,” came the snarling reply from Junkrat even as his stomach clenched. He’d been in too much of a hurry to enjoy the bread earlier, stale and hard as it had been, but at least his stomach didn’t feel like it was as cramped and folded in on itself as it had been when he first woke up.

“Want me to eat some first?” Roadhog offered, and his voice just oozed patience. He moved to grab the entrée and utensil package for the already-open MRE, but paused when Junkrat made a distressed noise.

That was _his_ possibly poisoned food.

Roadhog stared him right in the eye as he picked up the two packets and began to prepare the meal—elbow macaroni in tomato sauce.

It smelled good when Roadhog opened the package, and it smelled fucking amazing when it was heated by the little heater pack that came with it.

Junkrat was practically drooling on himself, and his eyes followed the spoon that dipped into the package and then up under the mask.

Roadhog chewed twice, swallowed, and took the two steps that separated them to hand the package over to Junkrat.

Subtlety could go suck a dick. Junkrat snatched it out of Roadhog’s hands and began to eat hungrily.  He ignored the spoon entirely and just started dumping bites into his mouth from the package’s edge. Roadhog only chuckled and kicked another sloshing canteen full of water his way before he turned to leave the base again.

Junkrat glared after him, eating and drinking _his_ things and angrily tamping down the swell of _whatever_ that was threatening to claw its way back out of his shriveled husk of a heart. He wasn’t fucking grateful. He’d never be grateful towards Roadhog. He’d been just fine on his own, and once he had two semi-functional prosthetics again, he would be fine and alone again.

All he needed was decent scrap for his leg—which he couldn’t build one-handed, not really— which meant that he needed an arm that wasn’t a piece of shit. But there was no way he could find prime Omnic remnants in a room full of medicine, cloth, and food.

Junkrat scowled and shoved the last of the noodles in his mouth. He scraped out the rest of the sauce with the spoon, balancing the package between his right arm and his stomach. Once he’d gotten all he could that way, he used his fingers to get the rest of the flavor from the corners. He hesitantly shifted down to retrieve the small dessert pouch that had come with it. It was a melted puddle of chocolate by now, but he didn’t give a shit.

He popped the whole thing in his mouth and sucked it off of his thumb and forefinger while he thought of the parts he could substitute and the ones he’d need to go out and find. One thing was perfectly clear in his head, though. Whatever he needed, he wasn’t going to be telling Roadhog jack shit.


	10. Chapter 10

_It was the end of what had turned out to be a very long day. It was just past mid-afternoon and Junkrat had already almost died twice. In the past six months, word had spread farther than just Junkertown about the secret that the Omnium held, seeming to disperse further every day, faster than they could travel sometimes.  Junkertown had apparently stopped trying to scavenge for Junkrat’s secret.  It was just easier to hunt him down and wring it out of Junkrat than to try and find it themselves.  Easier if Junkrat had been alone, anyway._

_“Hey, Hoggy?” Junkrat’s voice still rasped from the ligature that had been strangling him only a few hours ago._

_Roadhog grunted, staring out from their makeshift tarp shelter at the rainclouds gathering in the sky. They’d stopped under the scraggy husk of a boab tree and Roadhog wasn’t moving until the rain had stopped and the sun had dried the air._

_“Think after the payout, we could still stick together?” Junkrat asked. His voice sounded unusually soft, and it wasn’t from the injury._

_Roadhog’s mind, busy cranking away full throttle on what they’d need to do to refuel at the next junker settlement, and how to avoid getting too much attention, ground completely to a halt._

_“What?” he asked, harsh and loud, before he could stop himself and just give his usual noncommittal grunt. A grunt would spurn more conversation. This was just asking for an explanation. More words that actually meant things instead of his usual chatter._

_“I mean, I’d still pay you!” This time, the crack in Junkrat’s voice was most definitely from his injury, and he devolved into a coughing fit before he could continue. “I’d still pay up, just… y’know, more regular. ‘Cause I’d have the Omnium money.” He paused to laugh and winked at Roadhog. “I mean, we’d still be fucking over scavs fifty-fifty, too, and—“_

_“Go to sleep, Junkrat,” Roadhog snapped, trying to shake off the oily feeling of affection trying to worm its way up his throat._

_There was silence for a beat, then Junkrat turned over in the sidecar, the metal creaking with the force of his pouting._

_Roadhog hated that he knew what was going on behind him without even looking. He knew that Junkrat’s flesh arm was crossed under his stump, and his lips were pursed with the edges dragged down in a firm, unforgiving frown._

_“Just sayin’,” Junkrat said after long enough time had passed that Roadhog thought he’d fallen asleep. “S’nice—feelin’ safe for once.”_

On the bright side, Junkrat had been eating and drinking regularly. He wasn’t really sleeping—at least, not from what Roadhog could tell—but it was enough of a break from his violent, starving fury that Roadhog had begun letting him out of the cuffs to piss and tinker. Still, he never took his eyes off of Junkrat when he was free, and he still got tethered back to the bed most of the time. For his own safety and Roadhog’s.

Of course, that had brought out new habits to replace the ones Junkrat usually did when he was able to stand. He hated being still too much, Roadhog knew that, and while he was bored, conscious, and tethered, he’d started to scrape at the walls. He used his nails to fleck the old paint from the brick, making a few lists and schematics before descending into seeing how detailed he could draw a penis in the flaking paint. Sometimes they had a suspiciously passing resemblance to Roadhog.

So far, though, Roadhog was taking everything in stride.

The names, anger, and constant reminders that he was untrustworthy and terrible, they hurt, sure, but it wasn’t like it was unwarranted. Junkrat was pissed at him. Constantly and rightly so. It was easier to simply let him act it out, and Roadhog took the violence and verbal abuse because, honestly, he could take it—no problem—and if it made Junkrat feel better? It would be worth it. It was worth it.

Which lead to the not-so-bright side of having so much down time while Junkrat recovered.  Between the rescue and the first twenty-four hours of making sure that Junkrat wasn’t going to find a creative way to off either of them, Roadhog had been blissfully unable to think about what all of this meant for them.  The break in trust, the rescue, his… well, there was no use lying to himself.  They were feelings.  Of some sort.

A week ago, he had thought that giving Junkrat up would make things easier. That he’d drop the brat off, pick up his money, and rewind to a simpler time in his life, before Junkrat had picked him out in a dingy, rundown Junker bar a year ago and then clung on like a very loud and destructive leech.  He thought he would be able to go back, snap into his old self, _himself_ , but now things were just so fucked up that he couldn’t.   _He_ was so fucked up, he couldn’t.

Roadhog didn’t fucking understand _why_. No matter how many times he’d thought about it, running over options in his head, considering everything, he’d always come to the conclusion that leaving Junkrat was his best shot at surviving.

But he’d done that. And then he’d immediately _regretted_ it.  So what was he supposed to do now? There wasn’t going to be a way to repair their relationship, and Roadhog honestly wasn’t sure if that’s what he even wanted. He didn’t know, at all, and it was constantly nerve-wracking. He couldn’t shake the memory of the smile that Junkrat had given him as they shared a mattress in a building that was just barely still standing up on its withered frame.  It was in that moment, Junkrat _not_ squeezing to the very edge of the mattress, _not_ keeping his hands to himself, but rather patting Roadhog’s stomach like it was the most natural gesture in the world, when Roadhog had decided that things really needed to change. The words he’d said, soft and teasing and flirting if Roadhog had ever heard it.

It was _that_ , that softness and closeness that Junkrat thought he could just _have_ combined with the fact that Roadhog was constantly getting himself hurt for the sake of the loony fuck, and all he would think about afterward was what weird new adventure his boss would get them into. Who they would fight next.  How much loot they would split.  Traveling with Junkrat had made him eager to put himself in harm’s way. For another person.

It was so fucked up.

Fucked up, and unwarranted, and Roadhog’s thoughts kept cycling back every chance he got that Junkrat wasn’t seething at him, to wonder just how far off the deep end he’d really gone. His actions reeked of selflessness, of some sort of moral high-ground he knew he wasn’t capable of any longer. He was a junker, and junkers didn’t do selfless. They took what they wanted, when they wanted it, and if someone tried to stop them, then they’d end up dead. It was how things worked. It was how things had always worked for the last two and a half decades in Oz.

Roadhog was holding Junkrat down—gently, fucking _gently_ —to change his bandages when he made the mistake of not paying attention to his left hand.  It was natural that people wanted to fight and protect themselves with everything they had. It was a fact he was quickly reminded of when he leaned over to peel back one of the bandages on Junkrat’s burns.  A hard plastic MRE spork was suddenly shoved directly into his windpipe. He felt it break the skin and bite deep, tasted blood, and then he couldn’t breathe.

Hands pawed through his pockets, searching for the key to the handcuffs. Roadhog shoved Junkrat away, cursing himself. A good punch would cave the younger man’s head in right here, right now, and he wouldn’t have to worry about the growling and cursing and spitting behind him as he pulled himself away from Junkrat’s reach. Roadhog groped his way out to the bike, stars popping at the edges of his vision as he tried to locate a canister of hogdrogen before he passed out from lack of air.  Blood bubbled in his throat, and he wondered if he would suffocate from the obstruction or drown in his own blood first. He was able to take harsh, whistling gasps, but it wasn’t enough.  He needed to breathe.

Desperation started to edge in just as his hand closed around one of the thick yellow canisters in the chopper’s saddlebag. Roadhog ripped the plastic utensil from his trachea with one hand and slammed the canister into his mask with the other. A shuddering, painful breath in, and he was breathing normal again. Blood dripped down his neck to run across his chest and stomach, and Roadhog figured he should just be glad that Junkrat hadn’t hit an artery and kept on stabbing. He forced another deep breath, and coughed when the newly healed wound tickled the inside of his windpipe.

“Piece of piss!” Junkrat howled from within the gym, cackling like a lunatic. “Should have aimed a little better, right Hoggy?”

Roadhog growled and threw the empty canister to the side before stomping back inside the building and— Fuck, he couldn’t stay so violently mad when he saw the cheshire grin, the manic tilt to Junkrat’s head, the bruises and welts and lacerations that still cut across his body.

Everything was _so fucked up_.

Despite that, it was easier to approach the raving lunatic straining against the metal bond of the handcuffs, spilling onto the ground in his desperation to get to the key that had fallen from Roadhog’s pocket as he’d hurried out to the chopper. It was easier to think that Junkrat hated him enough to try to kill him. It was easier to hear Junkrat tell him he was a, “shitheaving fuckrag,“ that should, “go eat a saggy rotten dick with a side of your mother’s twat!” Somehow, that was easier to hear than Junkrat telling him he felt safe as long as Roadhog was around.

It was easier, and it was also supposed to be better.

So why wasn’t it better?

The fear should’ve been better. It was fear in Junkrat’s eyes when Roadhog approached him and he wasn’t paying strict attention to where Roadhog was. Occasionally, he would get involved in what little tinkering Roadhog would allow him, or he would just space out, which was the closest thing to sleep Roadhog had observed thus far.  Any time it happened, Junkrat would react almost instantly when anything, in this case, Roadhog, moved within the gym. Before Junkrat could catch himself, hide everything behind anger and bravado, Roadhog could see that flash of fear, or uncertainty, of not being sure where they stood or what Roadhog might do to him. It lasted for just a second, and then Junkrat snapped right back into place like a furious rubber band, angry and insulting and mouthing off in a way that begged for a sharp smack to the mouth.

But the smack never came, because it turned out seeing the fear and hatred wasn’t actually any better than a crooked grin and words that were, for a junker, kind and trusting.

Sometimes, Roadhog wished he had just snapped Junkrat’s neck instead of going through the motions of selling him out. There’d be no going back from that. He would have had to just keep on moving, buried his feelings in murder and theft and just kept moving forward. It could have been so easy, if it wasn’t for the fact that the thought of killing Junkrat always brought up the same feeling of panic he’d felt when he’d considered killing himself twenty years ago. He didn’t even want to try to rationalize _that_ out when he couldn’t even figure his way around the feelings that had made him rescue Junkrat in the first place. While he had plenty of downtime to think it all over, he very pointedly didn’t.

After the sporking incident, it took two days for Roadhog to drop his guard again, and he immediately regretted it.

All he’d done was go out to the bike to get a wrench that Junkrat claimed he couldn’t find, and returned—sans wrench—to an empty room. The wrench in question sat innocently in the toolbox that Junkrat had been sitting next to. Roadhog took a deep breath and let it out slowly before examining what had been left inside the room.

From the looks of it, Junkrat had taken the splintered remains of his right leg with him, and the shitty crutch he’d made three days prior had been pulled apart beside the cot instead of over where Roadhog had kicked it after that particular escape attempt.

The bike had been pulled up to the emergency door he’d used as an entrance when taking the place, which meant Junkrat had to have gone out the front of the gym and through the building itself.

An explosion shuddered through the floor of the gym, and he froze, heart thundering in his ears.

The mine at the gate.

He started moving forward numbly, unable to think anything aside from, “He should have seen it,” and, “I should have told him it was there…”

Roadhog bent the front doors of the school with the force he used to slam them open. He caught sight of the mangled front gate, and he felt his breath and strength leave him for a moment as he looked at the smoking hole in the ground. Past that, a distant figure, just barely close enough to make out the limping and hobbling gait of Junkrat scrambling away on a cobbled together prosthetic.

It was a quick change from relief to annoyance, which only doubled over into exasperation because _honestly_. Junkrat was a walking heart attack for him. It gave the kid too much power, and if he ever figured out how deeply Roadhog’s dedication went… well, he was angry enough that Hog knew he’d abuse the hell out of it.  Especially now.

Unlike the physical and verbal violence Junkrat was throwing at him, Roadhog didn’t know how well he would take emotional warfare. Their usual method of dealing with emotions was to punch things out and have it be done with. He couldn’t remember how Mako had dealt non-violently with feelings, or if he even had at all.

Once he had retrieved his canteen and filled his scrap bag, Roadhog took off after Junkrat.  He started out on foot, but hesitated when he saw that the young man seemed to be headed towards one of the abandoned scrap yards. The one that had a thin trail of smoke from a campfire pluming into the air.

Roadhog scratched the back of his neck and went back for the bike.  He needed to get there a bit more quickly, and he had a feeling that Junkrat wouldn’t be open to the idea of being carried back.

* * *

 

_The telltale sound of glass shattering came from the bar behind him. Roadhog ignored it, much more interested in making use of the luxury of indoor plumbing. They’d reached the very northern edge of the tainted Outback, where junkers were further between, and as long as you didn’t actually drink the water it was probably okay to use it._

_Then, he heard the reedy cackle of his employer and he was zipping up and turning back to the bar. His teeth ground together, and he had the man’s name ready on the back of his tongue, “ **Fawkes** ,” an annoyed growl that he seemed to have to keep using with the other Junker because he just _didn’t get it.

_He’d told him to lie low for_ two minutes, _and Junkrat couldn’t even manage that. No wonder half the country wanted to kill him._ Roadhog _wanted to kill him._

_When he reentered the bar, Roadhog saw a man on the ground, Junkrat standing on top of him with a broken liquor bottle in his hand and a vicious grin on his face._

_“Hoggy!” he greeted Roadhog as he shoved through the bathroom door. “This bloke’n’ I was just talkin’ about you!” He shifted his peg leg to rest on the back of the man’s head, right at the crux of his skull and spine. “Said you was… eh…” His grin sloughed off into the familiar look that Junkrat occasionally got when he lost his train of thought, but it split right back into the shiteating grin, coupled with a trilling giggle as he pressed his peg harder against the man’s head. “You tell it,” he urged, like it was a particularly good story rather than, Roadhog assumed, an insult._

_“Dinnit mean nothin’  by it,” the man blubbered from the wooden floor. His voice was muffled against the wooden slats strewn with broken glass—drinking glasses and bottles from the look of it. The place definitely stank more potently of whiskey and junkershine than it had before._

_The screws making up the knuckles on Junkrat’s prosthetic glinted with fresh blood.  The man’s jaw was swollen and his nose was definitely broken._

_“Let him up,” Roadhog growled._

_Junkrat’s face fell, and he made a whinging sound in the back of his throat. “He did! Meant something awful, mate. Dunno what it was, don’t get the reference, but—“_

_“Let him up.”_

_Junkrat pouted at him, and gave the whinging man another shove with his peg leg before sulking off of the bloodied man. He crossed his arms, the sharp edges of the bottle he was still holding grated against the metal of his prosthetic arm. Roadhog was sure that if it was still flesh he’d still have managed to be careless enough to slice his forearm open._

_Petty._

_“Dinnit mean nothing,” the man repeated, spitting blood on the floor and giving Roadhog a smile that bared his broken teeth and bitten tongue. Roadhog flexed his fists before caving in the side of the man’s face with a left hook._

_Junkrat let out a delighted whoop._

_He found out less than a minute later that the wretch owned the place, and all of the men and women inside were some degree of ‘friends.’_

A junker lay before him with a familiar broken and splintered broom handle shoved through his chest, twine and wire still attached from where Junkrat had finagled it onto what remained of his prosthetic.

Roadhog smirked at the ingenuity, but it dropped away quickly when he saw the blood leading away from the corpse. He didn’t tend to dwell on the past– avoided it whenever possible, really, especially considering Mako. Memories usually had some kind of emotional component built into them, and they never did anyone any favors out in the wastes. Sometimes it was almost enough to make him envious of Junkrat’s shitty memory.

He couldn’t shove back the swell of pride, though, as he took what was useful off of the dead junker and stomped past him. The same pride he’d had when Junkrat, reedy little slip of a half-starved, half-crazed man, had been slammed back against the bar with a hard grunt and just grinned at him through a split lip and with blood in his teeth like it was nothing to have the whole bar at their throats. “ _Finally having fun?”_ he’d asked of Roadhog then.

That had been almost a year ago, and it had been fun. The entire fucking year had actually been pretty fun.

There were drag marks through the blood, and that’s what Roadhog followed. He was close enough to the scrapyard that he could make out a few things. There was a single scrap rig parked inside of the chain link, two dirt bikes with decorated helmets, one decked out with spikes and the other had a buzz saw trimmed down to fit over the crown of the head. Cute.

Roadhog left his bike under some cover and walked the rest of the way. He didn’t bother to conceal his presence in the slightest. Let them see him coming. They couldn’t do fuck all about it anyways.

There was another corpse beside the entrance to the scrapyard, lying there with a gaping wound in his throat, what remained of his jugular. Looked like Junkrat had corrected his aiming problem.

There was a bloody bit of metal lying on the ground, surrounded by more blood and the signs of a struggle next to the fire pit immediately in front of the gate. The pit smelled like burned flesh, and his nose wrinkled as he skirted the thing. He just hoped he wouldn’t have to deal with even more burns on Junkrat.

The drag marks had turned into footprints leading away from the fire pit. Junkrat appeared to have tussled with a third junker, a faint trail of blood dotting the dust between the aggressively placed footprints. The blood and steps lead to a small, portable office building that looked like it had once housed the foreman’s office. Roadhog unholstered his gun and gripped the hook in his other hand as he approached. He could clearly hear Junkrat’s voice now, so distinct after all their time together, growling and grumbling from within and the curses of another junker. There was a squawk, a thud, and then silence.

Roadhog hurried forward, prepared to swing his hook through the narrow door as the room came into focus and he saw Junkrat stretched out on the floor next to a man with an old, rusted pen shoved through his left eye. The right side of the dead junker’s face was burned and they both looked like hell, covered in dust and soot and blood. The junker’s left ear was missing and blood covered his shoulder. Junkrat’s nose was broken again.  Blood ran in twin trails down his face and over his lip. An already red tongue darted out to swipe at the blood and he winced as he sniffed wetly. Roadhog ignored that his eyes were red and damp, that his chest was heaving as his hand gripped his hair.

A sigh of relief left Roadhog, drawing Junkrat’s attention. He sat up quick and scrubbed at his face as Roadhog entered the building, looking around for anything dangerous or useful. Finding neither, Roadhog turned his attention back to his employer. His eye had swollen back up too, but otherwise he was fine, not shot or shanked.

“Just fucking leave me be,” Junkrat told him, staring down at his lap. He was running his hand through his hair over and over again.

Roadhog shook his head and stepped forward to help Junkrat up, pulling him onto his foot with his hands on his upper arms.

Junkrat set his hand on the desk to steady himself. “Why not? You were willing to lose out on the treasure a week… two weeks? Fuck…”

“Two and a half weeks,” Roadhog supplied.

“Fuck you,” Junkrat replied, shooting him a glare. “You didn’t want the money then, why now? If you wanted to double cross them, you could have fucking done it _before they tortured me for a week_.” His voice became shrill, and he picked up the overturned pen holder to throw at Roadhog. It hit him, and Roadhog just sighed, scratching his chest and looking away from Junkrat’s pissed off face.

“It was only two days,” he says, for the fifth or sixth time. He’d lost count, but it kept coming up. He supposed it didn’t matter to Junkrat, he obviously thought it was a week, but it just made Roadhog feel like less of a piece of shit. Like maybe he was only a megashit, not a gigashit.

“You’ve got a bunch of shit to lie about, why the goddamned titlicking _fuck_ do you gotta keep lying about _that_?”

Roadhog just shook his head and grabbed Junkrat by the arm. “Let’s go,” he said firmly.

“Oi, not yet! Just bloody got here, at least let me get the scrap I came for,” Junkrat demanded, prompting Roadhog to snort and shake his head. No. No way was he letting Junkrat touch potentially sharp pieces of metal when he’d tried to kill Roadhog with a plastic spork only hours ago.

“Think I’m going to let you loose in a scrapyard when you tried to kill me and then ran off into the arms of some piece of shit junkers?” Roadhog asked.

Junkrat got the grin he’d perfected on Roadhog over the months, the one that promised that whatever Junkrat was planning was worth the myriad of inconveniences it would pose.

“No,” Roadhog said firmly.

“You got rid of the sidecar real quick, huh?” Junkrat said, knowing Roadhog wasn’t going to change his mind with anything but guilt.

Roadhog rolled his eyes behind his mask and began dragging Junkrat out the door of the old building. “Still got it. Just had to drive fast and it would have slowed me down.”

“Righto. Sell it off to a bunch of derro scum suit wannabes too?”

Roadhog’s hand tightened around Junkrat’s arm.

“Ohhhh, hit somethin’ with that one,” Junkrat cackled and hopped along with Roadhog’s strides. “That what I was doing? Slowing you down?”

Venom had entered Junkrat’s voice, and Roadhog finally opened his mouth to reply when a gun went off behind them and he felt the sharp heat of a shotgun’s pellets in his back.

“Oh,” Junkrat cackled, “wondered what happened to that one.”

There was one more junker. He was on the roof of the building, armed only with a shotgun and his ugly mug. Roadhog growled and shoved Junkrat away from him. As he turned to face the junker, he threw his hook, gauging where he was from the bullshit goddamned angle of his stupid motherfucking shotgun fire. His hook missed, but it was enough to send the junker leaping to the side with a curse. The gun clattered on the roof as he scrambled to get out of the way, and when the junker scooped it back up to take another shot, it jammed.

Roadhog drew his own gun and fired at the junker twice as he left from the roof.  He nicked him with scrap, but ultimately his weapon was too short range to do much damage to the fleeing junker. The junker took the wide-spread shots as an opportunity to duck away into the towering piles of scrap and stacked cars.

Roadhog reloaded his scrap gun, and as he passed by the building, he shoved Junkrat through the door. He was going to track down this stupid piece of shit that was somehow managing to make his life even harder. Junkrat snapped at him, but it was easy enough to ignore him. He was pissed. He had one thing on his mind.

He was going to find that fourth junker and break him in half.

Metal fell in the towering piles of scrap, and he carefully began following the sound and the little tells of movement through the yard.

Just when Roadhog was about to double back through a line of cars and refrigerators, a car creaked and he barely dove out of the way before it rolled off its precarious perch on the top of its tower, and slammed into the ground right where he’d been standing.

Roadhog snarled and lunged forward, lashing out with his hook at the man’s retreating back and only catching the stripped wire frame of a mattress for his trouble. He began to stalk the man again, significantly more pissed now that he’d almost been flattened by a car.

His patience was wearing thin, but Roadhog could still wait until the right moment. The junker would slip up. He would make a mistake, and then he would meet Roadhog’s hook. And then his fist. Both of them, though it would probably only take one.

The chance finally came when the junker tried to circle back around and retrieve his gun. Roadhog followed at a distance, allowing him to loop back toward the building and then, once he thought he could make a break for it, Roadhog lashed out.

The hook sailed past the man and he let out a premature whoop of victory before Roadhog jerked the chain. The wicked tip of the hook arced back toward the junker, skewering him and allowing Roadhog to reel him right back in.

As he got closer and began to plead with terrified abandon, Roadhog realized that he didn’t have a prosthetic on his right arm at all, but instead had three curved pieces of metal, shaped a bit like a garden trowel, curving over his hand—sharp and surprisingly strong for being so thin. Roadhog knew the last bit because the asshole tried to punch him with it.

Roadhog’s laugh started low in his belly and bubbled up through his chest as he grabbed the man by his arm and wrenched him closer so that he could slam his massive fist into his solar plexus.

He had some frustration to work out, and this man was going to help him avoid giving Junkrat any more head trauma than he already had. He ripped the three-pronged enhancement off of the man’s arm and held him down with his free hand.

Trowelfist screamed and begged as Roadhog brought the sharp, flat pieces of metal closer, nice and slow to make the terror last before he began carving. It didn’t take long before the body under him went limp, but it was fun while it lasted.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know a few of you are losing hope because of the paintrain. It's going to be okay. We're going to wrap the pain arc up soon. Don't lose faith <3

Junkrat thought about running again.

As soon as Roadhog left his side to go after the last junker, he thought about hopping his sniveling ass out to the decimated gang’s rig and taking off.  He could imagine it clearly, see himself covering the distance, cranking it up and driving as far and fast as he could.  Where didn’t matter.  Where was something he could figure out later, not important when all he wanted to do was put as much distance between himself and the massive piece of shit he’d thought was his best mate as possible.

He didn’t, though.  As much as he wanted to run and never look back, let his shitty memory erase the past year, he just sat there in the doorway of the run down office building and listened to Roadhog play hide ‘n’ go seek with the last junker. He stopped paying attention after a while, the clang of Roadhog’s chain made his adrenaline rush in a bad way, and the crash of metal from falling scrap annoyed the shit out of him.  He’d felt so fucking satisfied when Roadhog had gotten shot.  Why couldn’t he have just died?  

Junkrat tuned it all out and he rested his temple on the door frame wearily.  He didn’t realize he had drifted off until he heard the very close, very _eager_ laugh Roadhog got when he was about to do something really fucked up.  

Something really fucked up and _fun_.  Excitement, so different from the anxious _run_ feeling, yet so similar, coursed through him and a soft titter of anticipation left his throat.  The giggle brought him back to where he was, sitting in the ruins of a scrap yard, surrounded by dead junkers and unable to trust Roadhog as far as he could throw him.  Junkrat shook his head and his eyes filled again as frustration welled up in his chest.  He rubbed his fist against his left eye before shoving roughly past the split bridge of his nose to scrub at the other one, cursing at the pain in his nose and the pain in his chest.  This was ridiculous.   _He_ was being ridiculous.  Why was he still here? He shouldn’t feel anything but hate at the raspy sound of that fucked up laugh.

He _shouldn’t,_ but he did.  When he’d been lying on his back next to the dead junker—still lying less than a meter behind where he sat—and heard the rough sigh Roadhog had let out, he’d felt _relief_. He‘d felt a weight slough off his shoulders when he realized that Roadhog was there, though almost all of his assailants were already dead.  He’d felt _safe_ while knowing he was anything but.

“Fuck,” Junkrat growled under his breath, digging his knuckles into his eye and shaking his head again.  This was bullshit.  He didn’t _need_ Roadhog to survive.  He was _fine._  So maybe the first thing he’d done after escaping the gym was get caught, but what the fuck else was he supposed to do?  He couldn’t just avoid trouble, especially without two semi-working prosthetics.  All he could do was run face first into it and fight all the way through.  And he _had_ , and he’d killed them all.  

“Killed ‘em all on me own,” he muttered to himself, drawing his fist back from his eye and admiring the cuts on his knuckles from a few good punches he’d gotten into his second victim’s face.  He was short two limbs and weeks of sleep, but he’d managed to take the three assholes down all by his lonesome.  Sure, he hurt everywhere and some of his wounds had reopened but he had done it.  On his own.  Just him.  

Roadhog was a useless fucking shithead who Junkrat didn’t need.  He’d rather the massive old cuntbag just die already.

That’s what he told himself, anyway.

Junkrat used the wall to stand and began the move outside.  His leg was getting shaky from so much solo use in one day.  He hadn’t been without his prosthetic in years, and his flesh leg just wasn’t used to the added strain.  He glanced toward the junker rig one last time, even took the time to gauge the distance before his curiosity got the better of him and he went to investigate the silence that had fallen over Roadhog and the last junker.  When he rounded the corner, he saw Roadhog standing over the dead junker with what looked like some kind of clawed metal tool clutched tightly in his hand.  It was covered in what looked like the dripping remains of the junker’s mess of a face.

Junkrat couldn’t help the low whistle that left him, and Roadhog whirled, his free hand already on his hook.

 _Panic_.  The adrenaline resurged with a vengeance.  Junkrat hadn’t felt such a pure need to run in almost a year.  He turned to bolt away, but he had forgotten that he didn’t have his right leg and ended up flat on his face in the dirt.

He began to scramble when heavy footsteps approached him, but it was only a few seconds before he was being grabbed.  Junkrat kicked and squirmed and cursed because he _had_ to get away. He hadn’t been able to use his fight or flight instincts in weeks and now that he wasn’t chained to anything, he just wanted to _go._

Physically, Junkrat ran out of steam first.  He was already exhausted from everything that had happened to him, and he reluctantly sagged in Roadhog’s grip, still spitting curses and whatever angry shit he could think of at Roadhog. The big cunt just held him a foot above the ground.  He knew Roadhog was just waiting for him to calm down.  As soon as Junkrat stopped struggling, Roadhog’s hands relaxed around Junkrat’s arms.  The little puff of a sigh Roadhog made as his hands relaxed spurred Junkrat to keep fighting, weakly kicking and twisting between Roadhog’s massive hands pinning his arms to his sides and even if he knew he wasn’t doing jack shit, he wasn’t going to just give up because that’s what Roadhog wanted and _fuck him_.  

Junkrat couldn’t even tell what he was saying anymore, just knew that vile shit kept spewing from his mouth as he kicked Roadhog in the stomach as hard as he could muster with his left foot.  He focused on trying to hit that stupid pig tattoo right in the eyes and the snout as many times as possible.  He kept it up until Roadhog made that half growl, half sigh noise that told Junkrat he was tired of his shit, that everything Junkrat was doing was completely ineffective.

It pissed him off enough that Junkrat paused in his angry ranting to growl right back at him, shaking with rage as he spat at Roadhog again.  It hadn’t worked out well last time, but he didn’t give a shit.  He _hated_ being man handled, he _hated_ not having his prosthetics and he _hated_ Roadhog.  

Roadhog didn’t kill him for the spitting or the insults or the kicks, just kept holding him up.  It was enough to confirm what Junkrat had already begun to suspect—if Roadhog hadn’t killed him yet, then he wasn’t going to.

He still wanted his cut of the fucking treasure.  It had to be.

The realization made Junkrat sag, his energy drained completely and his chest aching. He told himself it was from the combination of too little sleep and being suspicious of all the food and water he was given.  It had left him hungry, tired, angry, and unable to do fuck all about any of it. That was why tears pricked at the back of his eyes and his throat felt like it had a vice clamped around it.

“I just fucking hate you,” he said after a moment of silence, still slumped between Roadhog’s hands.

“I know,” Roadhog grunted in response.  

Junkrat sneered at those two simple words, but didn’t renew his struggle.  He was slowly let back down until his foot was on the ground, and, when he didn’t immediately start fighting again, Roadhog released him for real, allowing him to balance for himself.

“Let’s go,” Roadhog told Junkrat before turning to walk back toward the entrance of the scrap yard.

Anger rushed back, but Junkrat couldn’t do anything with it, so he made a high pitched sound of frustration and threw up his arms.  “I told you I’m _staying_ ,” Junkrat snapped at Roadhog.  “I need proper scrap to build shit with, not the remains of a shoddy turret and some guns that were lying about—not that I _couldn’t_ ,” he clarified.  “And I’m not riding bitch on that stupid bike, fuck you.  Dunno how you carted me before, but I’m not going anywhere unless there’s a seat, and I ain’t hopping my happy ass back to your goddamned prison, so fuck you twice.”

Roadhog stared blankly at Junkrat as he crossed his arms and tried to ignore that he was trembling.  His leg was trembling from the strain of balancing and he was trembling from the adrenaline and the fear that he knew he didn’t need because Roadhog wasn’t going to kill him.  He still needed him.  Junkrat had leverage.

“Don’t want to spend the night out here,” Roadhog finally said after a long patch of silence.

“Ain’t gonna have to,” Junkrat told him, unclenching a little and nodding as if to himself.  “Just give me a few to make another side car–”

“Not letting you loose in here,” Roadhog cut him off.

Junkrat’s expression soured at that and he scoffed. “What, so I’m just supposed to come back to your little lock up with you, but you don’t trust me to dig through a little scrap?”

“Not letting you loose in here,” Roadhog repeated.

“Want me to go anywhere, you let me build a fucking sidecar,” Junkrat spat back, annoyance turning to vehemence.

“I’m not–”

“Then fuckin’ _drag me back_ ,” Junkrat snarled, his eyes narrowed and daring Roadhog to touch him.

Roadhog just stood there, his fists clenched and ever expressionless behind that stupid fucking goddamned mask.

“What? Not gonna slap a cuff on me? Drag me back to the posh little prison hell hole you carved out to hold me until I’m nice ‘n’ ready to fork over the Omnic bullshit?”

“You’re not a prisoner,” Roadhog said after a long silence.

Junkrat was used to his long silences, and he could usually gauge them.  This one had _nerves_ all over it.

“Yeah? Not a prisoner? Then why the cuffs?”

“To protect y–”

Junkrat cut him off with laughter.  It soon morphed into a rattling cackle and he took a shaky hop in Roadhog’s direction.  “ ‘To protect’ me?   _Me_? From what?!  Meself? Junkers?  Junkers you fucking _giftwrapped me for_?” Junkrat asked.

Roadhog shifted uncomfortably and Junkrat hopped another step closer, no longer worried about Roadhog grabbing him, no longer worried about the asshole cuffing him and tossing him over the back of the bike and ending up right back where he’d started.  If Roadhog really regretted what he’d done as much at Junkrat _wanted_ him to, he still had a whole lot of fucking pushing to do.  

“Well?” He asked, his voice was rough and his throat was dry.  “Whatcha trying to protect me from?” Sweat dripped into one of his eyes and Junkrat swiped at it with his wrist, brushing against one of his bandages on his face.  He grabbed it and ripped the gauze and tape off.  

“Trying to protect me from this?” He asked before reaching for another and ripping it free.  He let the bloody gauze drop to the dust and went for the bandages on his torso next.

Roadhog’s fists unclenched and he stepped forward as if he were going to stop Junkrat.  It made his adrenaline spike again and Junkrat hopped backward on instinct.  The exhaustion finally really caught up to Junkrat as his knee bent upon landing and his leg just gave out.  

Junkrat let out an undignified squawk as he crumbled to the ground and his ass met the dust.  Anger swelled up in place of any embarrassment and he growled and bared his teeth at the hand that was being offered to him.

“Christ, you can’t even keep me from falling over, you’re a useless piece of shit,” Junkrat snapped, still pulling at the bandages and cursing beneath his breath.

Useless fucking bodyguard, useless fucking piece of shit.  His hand skimmed over another gauze and tape bandage on his lower back and he ripped it free before returning his attention to the bandages swathed around his torso.  It was difficult to rip them off, layered and crusty as they were, and they pulled painfully at the wounds and the bruises.  He yanked and tugged and bit at the _stupid_ fucking goddamned material until he was exhausted again.  By the time he gave up, frustrated and shrieking, Roadhog had sat down and was just watching him have his fit.

  
  


“I hate you,” Junkrat spat, stopping his tugging at the half-shredded bandages and glaring as hard as he could at the mountain of a man sitting placidly in the dirt before him.  

“I know,” Roadhog grunted.  

There was a beat of silence where Junkrat tried to say something, anything else other than how much he fucking hated Roadhog.

“I hate you,” is all that comes out again.

“The cuffs were for protection,” Roadhog said gruffly.  “Until I knew you wouldn’t off yourself,” he added.  Junkrat could just hear the _or me_ hanging in the air between them.  They’re close enough that he can see the new skin from where he had shoved the spork into Roadhog’s neck to get away.  He doesn’t feel guilty.

“Still might just to get away from you,” Junkrat snapped in reply.  It hurt.  It hurt because he knew Roadhog was just there for the money.   _More_ money.  Greedy fucking pig bastard.  

Roadhog shook his head and then jerked it toward the scrap heaps.  “Go get your parts,” he told him before moving to stand and grunting with the effort.  

“Might find something nice and sharp to cut your throat with this time,” Junkrat pointed out with a sneer.

“Right,” Roadhog replied, not even sparing Junkrat another glance before he walked off.

Frustration welled up behind Junkrat’s throat and he raised his grimy hand to touch the cut above his eyebrow, curling up and wishing he didn’t have to deal with all this.  He didn’t need Roadhog.  He could take care of himself.

_Junkrat was trying to tape the bandage to his forehead, but it just fell back off again.  He growled and slapped it back on, causing his wound to throb with pain and the tape stuck to his eyebrow rather than skin.  He made a high pitched noise and carefully pulled the tape back, taking deep breaths as the stupid tape pulled at his eyebrow and brought tears to his eyes.  “Holy fucking shit on a shingle,” he breathed, trying to toss the bandage away from him but it stuck to his finger._

_Frustration built in his chest and he whipped his hand around until the bandage flew off._

_“Fucking bullshit bandage,” he mumbled, reaching for another bit of gauze and tape._

_“Stop wasting supplies.”  The tone made Junkrat wince, and he scooted away from the edge of the loft he had scrambled up into._

_“I’m not wasting them!” he replied, ripping off a piece of tape that was too short.  “Fuck…” he muttered, trying to rip off another piece to attach to it.  They ended up sticking together and frustration spiked through him again as blood ran into his eye and he wiped at his eye with the hand holding the tape, smearing blood across the whole roll.  “God fucking shit damn cunt!” he snapped, throwing the roll over the edge of the loft.  It hit the floorboards of the barn they were hiding out in, and he just let his forehead bleed, figuring it would stop soon._

_“Bring me the gauze,” Roadhog said, his voice closer than before, right at the edge of where the loft opened into the rest of the run down barn they were holed up in._

_“It’s fine.  Already stopped bleeding,” Junkrat lied._

_“Think I’m stupid?” Roadhog asked, causing Junkrat to flinch._

_He was going to answer, and it was going to be clever and biting, but Roadhog was sighing and setting the bloody tape back onto the edge of the loft.  It made the words die in his throat as blood ran freely down his face to drip off his chin._

_“Alright, fine,” Junkrat snapped, scooting closer to the edge of the loft and placing a square of gauze on the floor next to the tape._

_“Come closer,” Roadhog demanded, his massive hand taking the small square of gauze._

_Junkrat made a noise in his throat and reluctantly scooted closer to the edge until Roadhog could press the gauze to his forehead.  Roadhog’s left hand touched his cheek, gently holding him still, and Junkrat stifled the urge to yank back, grinding his teeth as the gauze pressed against his forehead._

_“Hurt?” Roadhog asked gruffly._

_Junkrat’s eyes snapped open and he realized that his face was screwed up like Roadhog was currently ripping his skull apart.  He relaxed a little and unclenched his jaw.  “Nah,” he said.  “Haven’t felt pain in years, mate.  Not since I was a tyke.”_

_Roadhog snorted and his gentle left hand suddenly pinched Junkrat, causing him to let out a yelp and jerk away from the edge of the loft.  He scrambled back on instinct until he realized that Roadhog was laughing.  Not that sick, twisted laugh he got when he was massacring cunts, but a soft, genuine, huffing chuckle that made Junkrat smile a little despite himself.  Just like that, the tense air had been broken._

_“You’re a fucking cunt-twat, that’s what you are, mate,” Junkrat snorted, a tittering giggle following it.  He still didn’t trust the big bastard, but… he’d had the chance to snap Junkrat’s neck, or haul him down and take his shit, and he hadn’t.  Roadhog wasn’t going to hurt him.  He owed him a lot of money, right?_

_“Yeah,” Roadhog agreed.  “And you’re still bleeding,” he pointed out, patting the edge of the loft lightly._

_Junkrat crawled back toward it, closer than before, and he put a few more squares of gauze between Roadhog’s massive fingers._

_“Come down here,” Roadhog told him._

_Junkrat wasn’t sure if the fondness was a product of his own screwed up mind or not._

_He hoped it wasn’t._

_“Sure,” he said, crawling forward enough that Roadhog could help him down._

Fury flooded Junkrat’s veins and he made a high pitched scream that he felt like he’d been holding back for years instead of weeks.  His hand moved up from his forehead to his hair and curled into it angrily.  He pulled and tugged and twisted, just so, so mad, so absolutely _pissed_ that this had happened, that things were so fucked up and Roadhog was acting like he still deserved half of Junkrat’s treasure.  Fuck him. _Fuck_ him.

He used what was left of his energy to stand and started moving around the scrap heaps to find what he needed.  There were tires of all sizes everywhere, but the wheels he needed were going to be difficult to find, and then an axle to shove them on.

Junkrat moved through the scrap yard slowly, not pausing when he heard Roadhog return with the bike.  The engine was unmistakable, and he was glad that it would cover up the choking noises he made as he went.  His face was a mess of dust, tears and snot, and he didn’t want Roadhog coming to investigate.  Didn’t want to see Roadhog at all.

Didn’t want him to pretend to care, not for the money, not for Junkrat to stop trying to kill him.

He just wanted him to fuck off.

Junkrat wiped his nose on the tattered end of a ripped bandage and kept moving, trying to find his parts.

He fucking hated Roadhog.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one took a little bit, but this train is still moving.

[[Chapter 1]](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/147401972620/duplicity-chapter-1-junkratroadhog) [[Chapter 2](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/147565703185/duplicity-chapter-2-junkratroadhog)] [[Chapter 3](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/148020315320/duplicity-chapter-3-junkratroadhog)] [[Chapter 4](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/148550710640/duplicity-chapter-4-junkratroadhog)] [[Chapter 5](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/148942134770/duplicity-chapter-5-junkratroadhog)]  
[[Chapter 6](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/149297616155/duplicity-chapter-6-junkratroadhog)] [[Chapter 7](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/149849557100/duplicity-chapter-7-junkratroadhog)] [[Chapter 8](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/150317235615/duplicity-chapter-8-junkratroadhog)] [[Chapter 9](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/151057171565/duplicity-chapter-9-junkratroadhog)] [[Chapter 10](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/152259037490/duplicity-chapter-10-junkratroadhog)] [[Chapter 11](http://sillyscrunchy.tumblr.com/post/154484619660/duplicity-chapter-11-junkratroadhog)]

* * *

 

The sidecar may have only taken a few hours if Junkrat had had his prosthetics and their tools. Since he had neither of those, the sidecar was barely a pile of scrounged parts by the time the sun had started to set. 

Roadhog had tried not to hover, but he found it difficult when there were just so many chances for Junkrat to accidentally impale himself on something, or intentionally create something volatile enough for another escape attempt. Roadhog was the only one who could feasibly protect Junkrat from anything that wasn’t within grabbing distance, but he wouldn’t put it past Junkrat to try to kill him out of a petty need for revenge, survival be damned. 

Junkrat just glared and stopped scrapping every time it seemed like Roadhog was watching him work, so he sighed and collected his own supplies and stripped parts from the junker rigs and bike to distract himself as much as possible. 

The next time Roadhog checked up on Junkrat, the temperature had begun to drop. He had long ago lost all hope of getting back to their makeshift base for the night, and was forcing himself to be satisfied with the fact that they were both alive and Junkrat had gone eight hours without trying to kill him again. 

There was a trail of parts to follow, all larger and far more useful bits than what usually trickled down naturally from being shifted and weathered for years on end. At the end of the trail of parts was Junkrat, lying on his back in the dust. He was greasy and dusty and looking like he was internally begging the circling vultures to come finish him off. 

Roadhog had to keep himself from heaving a sigh. He had been trying to keep his presence hidden for as long as possible, but his tread back to the bike for bandages and disinfectant was annoyed and heavy. By the time Roadhog came back, Junkrat had struggled upright and was sorting small, inconsequential parts like it was keeping him busy. 

Roadhog didn’t buy it. 

Stomping right up to Junkrat, he ignored the flinch as he dropped to his knees less than half a foot away from him. 

“You need to take it easy,” Roadhog told him, reaching for the skewed bandages that had remained trapped around Junkrat’s torso. They ripped easily under his hands, useless as they were now. 

“You need to _fuck off_ ,” Junkrat snapped back, batting his hands away. 

“I’ll fuck off when you stop hurting yourself,” Roadhog replied, ignoring the slapping hand and continuing his attempted examination of the exposed wounds, trying to see what hadn’t healed enough to go without bandaging. “Or when you get some sleep,” he added, figuring he could accept one or the other. Both was definitely asking too much of him right now. 

It wasn’t until Roadhog had started carefully cleaning the wounds, still bleeding past cracked scabs, that Junkrat said belatedly, defensively, “I sleep.” 

“That weird thing you do with your eyes open isn’t sleeping,” Roadhog told him, snorting at the memory of just how disconcerting it was. When he glanced up, Junkrat was making that blank face with wide eyes that he always did when he ‘fell asleep.’ A harsh laugh rattled through Roadhog’s chest. 

Junkrat let a chuckle slip out as his expression broke, and it was a moment. For a single second, things felt nice. 

They had been here a million times before, Roadhog bandaging Junkrat up, or vice versa, making light of it all. 

Junkrat seemed to become aware of it at the same time Roadhog did, because the crooked smile that always accompanied his chuckle was suddenly gone. He started scooting away from Roadhog, grumbling about where he can put his sleep and his bandages and also his head. 

Huffing out a sigh, Roadhog reached for Junkrat to grab onto his harness. It wasn’t there, of course, so he settled for grabbing him by the scruff of his scrawny neck and dragging him back towards himself and the kit. 

“ _FUCK OFF_!” 

Junkrat snapped back from being nearly genial to enraged like a high-tension spring. He struggled and fought against the hold Roadhog had on him, but Roadhog’s hand was still large enough to wrap all the way around his neck, fingers easily capable of choking him. Roadhog kept his grip firm, determined that if any choking did occur, Junkrat would be the one to make it happen with his own useless thrashing. 

It took a bit of finagling, but Junkrat eventually calmed down enough. Between not eating or sleeping properly, and overdoing it while escaping and scrapping, his energy rapidly waned, left him with nothing left to keep fighting. Roadhog was finally able to resume looking over his wounds and clean him up. He kept his hands gentle as he directed Junkrat’s head this way and that, making him open his mouth so he made sure that his raw gum wasn’t getting infected. There was no way he’d be able to get Junkrat to rinse with salt water as a precaution, so he didn’t even bother suggesting it. 

Once his torso and face had been tended to, Roadhog moved Junkrat’s arms this way and that, cleaning away dried blood and bandaging what had reopened while he’d climbed through the rusted hulls of the junkyard. There were even a few new scrapes from jagged bits of metal he’d been too wrapped up in emotions to pay attention to.

 

By the time Roadhog was done patching everything up, Junkrat looked more sad than he did angry. It was such a strange look that Roadhog almost reached to touch his face. As soon as Junkrat noticed that Roadhog was looking at his face, a sneer immediately replaced the look and he was right back into the angry little shit routine he’d been doing for the past few weeks. 

“Done yet, mum?” he asked, voice jagged from dehydration. 

Roadhog didn’t say a word, just put his canteen of water in Junkrat’s hand and went back to retrieve the crutch he’d made while Junkrat was pulling parts. 

Once Junkrat had a more stable means of moving around, he began collecting parts all over again. It took a few minutes, but when he noticed Roadhog standing lamely by and watching, he started shouting orders. Another step towards where they had been. Roadhog picked up the larger pieces as directed, the frame and the chassis of the new side car, and piled them near the office building. 

There weren’t a whole lot of parts, side cars not being too terribly complicated. Once they had all been collected, Junkrat sat down and started nudging everything into arbitrary groups that made no sense to anyone but him. 

While Junkrat sorted and muttered to himself, Roadhog took the time to build a fire in the gutted office to combat the cold, breaking out the food for both of them. 

:::::

Roadhog was quickly racking up a whole list of things he regretted. He regretted trading away Junkrat in the first place. He regretted not taking out everyone present in the warehouse and then returning to Junkertown to fuck up Bangaroo and Kangaboom together as a team, and he was now adding ‘not bringing a blanket’ to his regrets list as he watched Junkrat huddle and shiver across from him. The small fire was enough to stave off the worst of the cold, but it wasn’t enough to be comfortable. 

As far as Roadhog could tell, Junkrat hadn’t kept anything sharp on him. He had made an exaggeratedly big deal about putting his used spork in the fire and allowing it to melt from a potential plastic weapon into a curled and crisped black puddle on the coals. It seemed like sleeping for Roadhog was going to be less dangerous than staying awake and risking being pissy and disoriented from lack of sleep. They didn’t exchange a word as he stretched out on the ground. 

Roadhog slept lighter than usual, dipping in and out of his dreams and giving everything an unsettlingly surreal quality. There was a dream about an emu that could talk but ran away from him when he tried to pet it. It turned on him with bared fangs when he finally got close to it, even though he hadn’t actually been chasing after it. 

He blinks at the fire for a few seconds before slipping back into sleep. A few other dreams were too indistinct for him to really get what was going on, until one managed to stick out. It was the one where Junkrat crawled up onto his stomach and slit Roadhog’s throat with his index finger while he just sat there, placid and unmoving. The look in Junkrat’s eyes was the same one he’d had in the basement, half high of his rocker, and half in wonder at seeing Roadhog there. Even in his dream, Roadhog felt his breaths beginning to clog and drown with blood when Junkrat’s hand, empty before, came back up with a bloodstained yellow canister. Roadhog reached for it. His hand felt heavy and wrong, like it had been encased in cement. He grasped for the canister in front of him, but Junkrat easily shook his hand off and grinned before slotting the canister into the mask himself. 

“ _Fuck_ ,”Roadhog grunted as he came back into the world and looked around him, half expecting Junkrat to be in his lap. 

Orange eyes reflected the low light of the still-glowing coals across from him, just barely close enough to benefit from the warmth and keep the worst of the shivers away. Junkrat hadn’t moved since Roadhog had closed his eyes, and he probably hadn’t slept, either.

“Bad dream?” Junkrat asked, and there was just enough of a bite to it that Roadhog instinctively knew that he must have been talking in his sleep. 

Roadhog made a grunt that he hoped came across negatively, shifting to drag some more flammable trash onto the coals. The shelter of the office building, in a stroke of luck that Roadhog felt was very overdue, managed to contain the heat just enough to make the frigid cold of midnight bearable. 

“You haven’t slept since I got you out,” he said after a long space of silence that felt unnatural with Junkrat awake across from him. He had barely even blinked in the past few minutes. 

“Nah,” Junkrat replied easily. “Think I’m gonna sleep ‘round you?” He snorted and shook his head. “You keep worrying about me offing myself and I worry about you offing me. that’s where we’re at. Great fucking partners both worried about me carking it.”

Roadhog kept watching him, glad that his own face was hidden behind his mask. It hurt that that was what Junkrat thought, and that unnerved him. He hadn’t cared what anyone thought about him in a long time. 

“Killing you would be stupid,” he said, rather than admitting that he wanted Junkrat alive and well. Rather than admitting he cared about Junkrat’s wellbeing. _Cared_. 

“Yeah, guess so,” Junkrat agreed, picking at his new bandages with his nails. He was sneering down at them and he suddenly gave a snort. “Still have to get your cut of the treasure, yeah?”

Roadhog clenched his hand into a fist, his knuckles cracking. It made Junkrat jump, and Roadhog felt like an absolute bastard for not regretting that. “Yeah,” he lied. “Still have to get my cut of the treasure.”

Junkrat nodded. It was what he had been expecting, right? He always enjoyed being right, it always put a big fucking smile on his face. Right now, he just had that same twisted sneer. “Knew it,” he said, and even if that had been the answer Junkrat had been expecting, the answer Roadhog thought he wanted, he seemed unhappy with it. 

“Yeah,” Roadhog rumbled. “I’m a fuckin’ book.”

“That you are,” Junkrat agreed, snorting again as he picked up a long stick to poke at the fire. “Just gotta read you right and all your fucking bullshit tumbles out. Won’t be making that mistake again.”

Roadhog rolled his eyes and sighed. As much as he deserved the jabs, he was getting a little tired of them. “Yeah?”

Junkrat wrinkled his nose and amped up his sneer across the stoked fire. “Yeah.”

“You regret saving my life, then?”

Junkrat’s eyebrows shot up and the wrinkle in his nose completely relaxed away before he could notice to keep it there. For a moment, he seemed speechless. Then the moment was gone, and he got his expression back under control. The snarl returned with a vengeance as he growled, “Dunno what you’re talkin’ about, mate.”

That answer got a huff and a nod from Roadhog. Of course he’d figured that, deep down, Junkrat hadn’t really meant to save him. Why would he? “You shoved a canister in my mask,” he said. “I was almost dead in that basement, and you had a hogdrogen canister.” Roadhog could see Junkrat rubbing at the little, barely healed scratches on his left knee with jittery fingertips. His stick was abandoned just as quickly as it had been picked up. 

“Where did it come from?” Roadhog asked, once the silence had stretched on enough that Junkrat’s fingers had relaxed, like he’d figured the subject had passed. They immediately started picking again, and Roadhog nearly missed Junkrat’s shrug. 

It was something he’d wanted to bring up. Junkrat had definitely been the one to take it down there, seeing as Roadhog was the only one who could make them and no one but Junkrat would ever have access to a full can. 

Once again, he let the silence simmer between them, his snout pointed at Junkrat expectantly. 

“Fuck off, I dunno why it was there,” Junkrat said once the long patch of silence had gone on too long. It was an obvious lie. He was avoiding eye contact as he kept picking away nervously at his scabs. “If I had known you were just going to be an ass about every fuckin’ thing, I would’a just let you die ’n’ all,” he mumbled, rubbing at his right elbow and chewing on the inside of his cheek. 

Roadhog snorted and huffed out a short laugh at Junkrat’s attitude. “Yeah? You would’ve died with me, Rat,” he told him, shifting around to try and get comfortable enough to sleep again. There was no sense in pushing anymore. Junkrat liked to talk, he would get around to it if Roadhog just left him to stew long enough. “Get some shuteye, mate.”

“Go fuck youself,  _mate_ ,”Junkrat snapped back, immediately back on the defensive. 

Roadhog just snorted in response and settled down for his sleep. 

It took a long time, long enough that Roadhog thought Junkrat was asleep. He’d started to feel himself slip away too when he heard it. “You only carry three.”

Roadhog grunted out a, “huh?” and shifted up so he could focus on Junkrat a little more. 

For a second, he looked like he was about to tell Roadhog to fuck off again and feign sleep, but instead, Junkrat straightened up and looked Roadhog in the eye. 

“You only carry three canisters with you,” he told Roadhog plainly. “I started carrying one for emergencies. Just ‘cause I know you’re a dumb idiot who fucks right into situations he ain’t needed in.” The nice thought finished in at least three individual insults, but Roadhog didn’t care about being called stupid, a meddler, or a poor planner—Junkrat carried a spare canister in case Roadhog took too much damage after the first three. 

Affection swelled up in his heart despite all the bullshit Junkrat had put him through in the past few weeks. He still loved the asshole in spite of everything. 

“We’re waking up early,” Roadhog told Junkrat, letting his eyes close again. “We’ll both finish the side car and then head back to the base.”

“Up yours,” Junkrat replied, and Roadhog could _feel_ Junkrat flipping him the bird.  “You’re not touching my sidecar.”

The harsh words didn’t dull Roadhog’s smile, though, and he slept a little easier. He hoped that if his feelings for Junkrat had survived getting stabbed in the throat, shot several times, and having to chase his dumb ass across the fucking outback, then something of their old partnership might still be salvageable. 


	13. Chapter 13

**  
**Once he knew Roadhog was asleep, Junkrat crept out to start working on the chassis for the sidecar.  He had pulled parts with his old design in mind, but once he’d lined everything up in the sand according to the blueprints, some of the pipes and rods he’d salvaged turned out to be too short. He started losing his place halfway through connecting the second support to the first cross-pipe. **  
**

It felt a bit like he was sleeping, staring at the parts, but as suddenly as he drifted off, he would jerk awake again, leaving him holding a collection of parts he didn't remember picking up and everything feeling  _wrong_.  He couldn’t remember for the life of him what the fuck he had been doing.  

Junkrat took a deep breath and stared at the mess in front of him.

Building a sidecar.  That’s what he was doing.  Putting together the frame for the chassis.  Alright.  He could do this.  

And he did do it; for about fifteen minutes before he lost his place again, his mind snapping back together with a different set of parts in his hand and a different configuration on the ground before him.  He thinks.

Junkrat let out a frustrated noise and flopped back in the dirt, something he regretted immediately.  His head hit a rock, and every ache and pain that had finally quieted since they had gotten out of Junkertown flared back up and ripped an agonized groan out of his throat.

He froze when he heard his own ragged voice echo off of the metal around him.  There wasn't any noise coming from the office, but Junkrat still turned his head to look anyway-- just to make sure he wouldn't be seen laying there looking pathetic.  Not that he gave a shit what Roadhog thought.  

His abdomen screamed as he sat up, but it wasn’t as bad as it was a week ago.  He felt a little bit less like tenderized meat and more like himself. He teased at the split in his lip and tried for a smile. It hurt, but the cuts from before had mostly healed. He smiled to himself.  His grin split the scab and sent a sharp pain spiking through his bottom lip as he remembered how many times he’d been smacked in the gob. Granted, it had been with good reason. He had never been able to keep it shut.

Junkart took a deep, steeling breath and got back to work.  He was slower with one hand, but he was going to fucking finish this side car before Roadhog woke up.  Several pieces came together with wire, twine and haphazard screws before he slipped again.  At least this time he knew he was asleep rather than just losing time.

_The room was dank and dark with concrete walls and floor.  All he could smell was his own blood clogging his nostrils.  He was alone when he woke up, but as soon as he shifted, the traitorous chain squeaked, and brought someone swaggering through the door._

_It wasn’t long before one of the brothers showed up.  He still couldn't tell them apart; he just knew that one hit hard, and the other looked like he enjoyed watching more than doing the actual hitting. One always called him Junkrat, and one called him Fawkes. Both did the play-nice bit at first.  He thinks.  Maybe.  It was at least one of them._

_A brother asked him a question, but he wasn't listening._

_“Maybe your boyfriend knows,” Junkrat replied when the shit-faced cock gobbler stared at him, waiting for an answer._

_He was backhanded by a metal-plated prosthetic and new blood filled his mouth and nose.  He spat it at the brother and grinned._

_Junkrat’s ears were ringing, but he could see the asshole’s lips moving.  Spitting again, he shrugged his right shoulder carelessly.  It made his left one scream, but it was worth it to piss his captor off._

_“Can't hear you, don't care-- maybe you could just…” Junkrat started to slowly turn in a circle.  The first few days, he had been testing whether or not he could still feel his arm.  Now, it was just fun and gave him a chance not to have to look at the Bangaboom shitstick in front of him._

_Once he finished his slow circle, he spat again; this time, dryly.  He was too dehydrated to have any saliva of his own, and his gums had mostly stopped bleeding.  His hearing was almost back, if the click of the still-shifting chains was any indication._

_“Sorry, mate, what were we talking about again?” he asked._

_“You were about to tell me where your fucking treasure is, Fawkes,” the brother gritted out, his fist clenched, absolutely prepared to knock the shit out of Junkrat._

_“Oh, yeah.  Sure was.  Better idea—why don't you go shove that fist up your brother’s ass-- maybe he’ll do the same and all three of us will be happy in the end, y’know?”  Junkrat let out a high giggle that turned into a hacking wheeze when a punch landed just beneath his ribs.  Black stung at the corners of his vision, and he knew what he had to do to get put back to blissful, sweet sleep._

_“You punch like a right pussy.  Your arm tired from jerking off your brother?  Maybe you two should cool it—”  Punch.  “I hear things, mate—” Metal fist this time, punch, bones cracking.  He’s not sure which ones.  “He’s definitely fucking around with that lanky sheila.  Or… maybe that was a bloke?  Nah, sheila.  The one with the scar? You know the gal--” Metal fist to his temple.  Darkness, silence, peace._

The clink of chain woke him up, and Junkrat was back in the basement, waking up to another day of torture.  He could taste blood, smell burnt flesh, and he immediately struggled on instinct, the ghost of the chain still strangling his left arm.

He didn't realize he was in the middle of a scrapyard instead of the basement until Roadhog crouched down in his line of sight.  His posture was similar to that of someone trying to convince a kitten they weren't intimidating.

Junkrat twisted his panicked expression into a sneer as quickly as possible and shrugged the rest of his exhaustion away.  He’d been so careful before.  He couldn't fall asleep.  He couldn't trust Roadhog.  

He couldn't fall asleep because it could put him right back in that shitty basement with Kangabitch and his twinky little fuckbrother.

Even if it  _was_  fun to remember what he could of his backtalk, his dreams were always worse than reality.  He had been on a fucking roll every time he’d opened his mouth, and he’d known his words cut deep because they would work harder and harder to hurt him.  Maybe it was the drugs; maybe it was having nothing to lose.  Why place nice if he was going to die anyways?

Every waking moment, he had spewed shit from his mouth. The basement had been a goldmine of grief, and Junkrat had had no trouble channeling the hate and pain from Roadhog’s betrayal into cutting insults. The more they did to him, the more Junkrat bitched and complained and came up with increasingly unflattering things to call the two cuntbags.

His only source of joy was remembering how much he had shit on the brothers’ threats and abuse.  All of it, every last second— fuck. Was it two days, or was it a week? His fingers jumped to the lines carved into his lower back, and he ran his thumb along the six vertical tally marks, and the seventh line. It was a diagonal stripe that ran jaggedly across three of them but missed the fourth. How could he believe Roadhog when he had the scars for every day he’d woken up in that hellhole?

What kind of choice was a backstabbing cunt or two dick-faced brotherfuckers?

Maybe he should just average it out.

If he did, then that left it at four and a half days. Should he round up or down? Up. Because being reduced to that sniveling bullshit in five days was more believable than fucking two.

Maybe his math was wrong. It didn’t seem right, and he was pretty good with numbers. Maybe it was the lack of sleep.

Junkrat heard Roadhog sigh, and he realized he’d been mumbling along a little. He wasn’t sure what had actually made it out of his mouth, but it wasn’t enough that Roadhog wanted to argue so at least there was that.

Nervously, Junkrat watched him stand and walk away. Maybe Roadhog had gotten tired of Junkrat being zoned out, or maybe whatever curiosity had brought him out to see where Junkrat had gotten off to had finally been sated.

As soon as Roadhog was out of sight, Junkrat felt his mind disperse again, like a cluster of flies on a corpse that had been disturbed.

It was fucking impossible for them to pull all that shit in two days.   No one would believe that.   _He_  wouldn't believe that. Not even if he had riled the twins up more—which would be hard to do; his entire reason for existing had been to make them as furious as possible.  Even if they had had friends-- no, not friends, those shit wheels didn't have friends. Cronies! Definitely cronies.

Junkrat's thoughts slammed back together when a MRE was tossed in his lap.  He let out a confused squawk, and jerked away from it, scuttling back a few meters before he realized that he was fine.  It was food.

He glared up at Roadhog, who was impassive as always behind his mask.  He leaned down to set a canteen of water next to the MRE, coming within three meters of Junkrat, which was  _too close_   _for comfort_  before he turned and walked around the strewn out parts of the chassis to sit and eat his own food.  

Junkrat narrowed his eyes harder at Roadhog, but it didn’t look like he was paying Junkrat any mind, too busy very deliberately tucking in.  Junkrat turned his sour expression onto his own food and water as soon as it was obvious that he wasn’t going to be starting any shit with Roadhog.  His stomach twisted, begging him to crawl forward and shove the whole thing in his mouth, waxy packaging and all.  He managed to retain some dignity by scooting forward and carefully opening the packets.

They ate in silence, Roadhog’s mask was up just enough to let him put shit in his mouth, as usual, and Junkrat remained uncharacteristically quiet.  As much as he wanted to murder anyone who might dare to say that this experience had caused a change in him, he knew it had.  It wasn't just that he and Roadhog didn't have the same partnership anymore. Junkrat felt like if he spoke, he might let out all the feeling and demons clunking around in his head, and the last thing he wanted to do was look vulnerable to a person he knew he couldn't trust.

Despite Junkrat’s tendency to inhale his food, Roadhog finished his first.  He set his trash to the side and stared at the loosely mapped out parts of the chassis for a moment before he began to pick up and fit parts together, like he’d already figured out the puzzle Junkrat had been trying to nudge together in his mind.

Junkrat made a strained sound and reached forward to slap Roadhog’s hands away, his arm swinging wide and violent, desperation making the strike sloppy and causing Junkrat’s hand to barely glance off of Roadhog’s.

Roadhog looked up at Junkrat, the smoky lenses of his mask giving away nothing.  The tense set of his shoulders was the only indication that anything had happened at all.  Junkrat very suddenly realized what he had done and everything inside him began to scream  _back down, apologize_.  He opened his mouth, but instead of the victorious insults and jabs he had been so proud of in the basement, all he could hear was his cracked and twisted voice begging Bangaroo and Kangaboom’s crony, telling him  _he’ll pay him anything, just get him out of here_.  It made shame well up in his chest, and he wondered if he was going to puke up the food he just ate.  It would be a waste.

Roadhog touched his chassis again, and it brought Junkrat back.  He slapped Roadhog’s hand again, more firmly this time, and regained his glower despite the spike of adrenaline advising him to run while he wasn't handcuffed or chained down.

“Fuck off,” he growled.

Roadhog chuckled and raised his hands, like he was saying no-harm, no-foul.

“ _Fuck off over there_ ,” Junkrat told him, nodding back to the office.

Roadhog stared at him for a second before he nodded and stood back up with a grunt.

“Sure, boss.”

Junkrat’s watery, narrowed eyes followed Roadhog back to the office, and Junkrat was trying to get something out, anything besides just letting that “sure boss” sit in the air like a bad stench, but… fuck, he just couldn't get words past the sharply aching lump sitting in his throat.  There was nothing he could say to that, besides the strangled, “fuck off!” he threw after Roadhog’s retreating form.

It felt  _nice_ , and he  _hated_  it.

:::::

Junkrat did what he could with what he had, but a fist-sized ball of twine and ten meters of small gauge wire could only get him so far.  He had basically stripped all the easy shit out of the path already winding through the yard. It would take an hour, at least, to find more.

Before all this, it would have taken him all of five minutes.

He glanced at the crutch Roadhog had given him, and he felt-- something.  Something that didn't quite hurt at first, but then it did.  A lot.

Junkrat pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed heavily.  His throat burned and when he tried to open his eyes, they swam.  He was not asking Roadhog for help. He was going to do it himself, even if it took two goddamned hours, he was going to--

A bundle of wire and a canvas pouch of tools hit the dirt with a metallic clank.  Junkrat jerked back in surprise, his eyes opening and dampness escaping them.  He didn't recover as quickly as he would have liked into a sneer.  His nose burned and his eyes swam, but he gave it his best, once he’d remembered to narrow his eyes and wrinkle his lip despite the tears carving tracks through the dust and grime on his face.  He didn't want anything that Roadhog could give him.

“Fuck off,” he snapped, shoving back the memories of all the times Roadhog had known what he needed before he even said anything.  All the times he’d helped and healed… but the memories didn’t stop, they just kept coming.  His stupid, jumpy brain moved from one warm, tarnished memory to another and his eyes just kept swimming.  He cursed and forced himself to look back down at the chassis.  

“Need anything else?” Roadhog asked, ignoring the order.  

Junkrat moved some parts around before scrubbing his eyes.  He could feel Roadhog watching him, knew something had slipped out a few minutes ago, knew that Roadhog’s shoulders were down and forward, and that he was still.  The frozen kind of still, like he was waiting for Junkrat to cry more.

He was fucking pitying him.

“Stop it,” Junkrat snapped, looking up from the chassis sharply. “Stop  _fucking looking at me like that_ ,” he shrieked, his voice cracking with fury.  “ _Fuck the hell off_!”

Roadhog huffed and hitched up his pants before letting his hands rest on his hips.  “ ‘m just trying to help,” he said.  “We can't spend another night out here.  Don't have the food or blankets for it.”

“Then go back and  _get_  food and blankets,” Junkrat snapped.  He didn't want to stay out here, not really, but he had to make things hard for Roadhog.  He had to make his life hell, had to get his payback, little by little.

Roadhog sighed and shook his head.  “We’re going back today, sidecar or no sidecar,” he told Junkrat.  “Either get it done or you’re riding bitch.”

“You think you can trust me not to shank you?” Junkrat asked, but it felt wrong as soon as it left his mouth.  When Roadhog’s mask turned to look at him, he spat and acted like he meant it.

“Yeah,” he said before turning to lumber off.  “Think I can.”

“Fuck _him_ ,” Junkrat hissed, flipping the bird at Roadhog’s retreating back.

Once he was satisfied that Roadhog wasn't coming back, Junkrat pulled out some parts he had tucked away in his pocket and began fiddling them into a scrap grenade.  He kept an ear out for the heavy tread of Roadhog’s boots as he worked, pointedly ignoring the wire Roadhog had given him for all of five minutes before reluctantly dragging it closer and cutting it into suitable lengths.

How  _dare_  he just fucking  _trust_  Junkrat.  He kept trying to hurt and kill him over and over again, but the stupid asshole wouldn't fuck off and he kept giving Junkrat openings. It was too fucking easy.

He hated it.  He hated Roadhog.

Just as Junkrat carefully slid the finished device into his pocket, Roadhog returned with another canteen of water.  

Junkrat scoffed at him and acted like he was scratching his bandages, which  _did_  itch, he hadn't noticed until just then.

“Stop scratching the bandage,” Roadhog told him, offering the canteen.

“Sure, Mum,” Junkrat said, still scratching even though it had stopped itching.  “While I’m at it, why don't I sell you out and run off with a bundle of cash?”

Roadhog snorted dismissively in response and leaned down to set the canteen next to Junkrat. His hand brushed Junkrat’s knee as he pulled away.

_Too close_.  He hadn’t realized Roadhog had been too close until he was already walking away. Junkrat bristled and rage boiled up so hot and sudden that he was reaching into his pocket before he could stop himself, wrapping his fingers around the grenade he had just made and pulling it out as Roadhog walk back toward the bike.  Who said he could get that close?  Who said that he could  _touch him_?

Junkrat’s hand shook, and he hauled back to throw it--

But he couldn't follow through.  He tried.  He tried a hell of a lot.  Several times.  He had it hauled back over his shoulder, ready to launch, and he held it there until his shoulder ached, but he didn't throw it.

He still needed--  _no_  he didn't  _need_  Roadhog.  Roadhog was just his easiest way to get back to their base.  He couldn't start the hog himself and like hell he was going to take one of those shit heaps the junkers had been driving.  Roadhog’s bike was the best piece of machinery left in this stupid, messed up country, and Junkrat wasn't going to blow her up because her owner was twelve massive pieces of shit stacked on top of each other.

The bike didn't deserve that; he would wait until he could get  _just_  Roadhog.  Then he would be free of the shitstain.

Yeah.

He tucked the grenade back into his shorts and went back to work on the chassis, already feeling more at ease with the weight of an explosive against his thigh.

Roadhog brought him another meal as the sun began its descent and Junkrat ate it just to get him to fuck back off.  

Which he didn't.  He started trying to touch things again, putting them together and securing them with wire and bolts and Junkrat hated that he was doing it right, that he knew where things went even without Junkrat's instruction and he hated that Roadhog thought he could just keep trying to stick his stupid piggy nose where it didn't belong.

Junkrat grabbed the side of the chassis shell that he was working on and tugged, dragging it out of Roadhog’s hands.  A piece of scrap caught Roadhog’s palm and he grunted, jerking his hand back as blood dripped across the rusted metal and into the dust.

Junkrat cackled at Roadhog and wrapped his arms around his side car as best he could with it being only half built and sharp as hell.  

Whatever.  A few more cuts was nothing compared to what he already had.

“I told you to fuck off, didn't I?” Junkrat said.  “It’s almost done and it’s  _mine_  so go back to your dumb bike and act like you got something useful to do  _away_  from me.”

Roadhog sighed and held his thumb over the cut.  “Junkrat, I’m just trying to help.”

“I don't  _need_  your help!  I don't  _need_ anything.”

“Yeah, you had shit locked down before I got there--”

“ _You_  did that to me!” Junkrat’s voice was so high and angry that it almost didn’t come out of his throat.  “You forget that or something?   _You_  handed  _me_  over to those shit bags and now you got me all strung up in handcuffs like I’m some fuckin loony what wears other people's skin for thongs!”  Junkrat snorted and shoved the sidecar away to throw his arms up in the air.  “How can you  _actually_  expect me to let you touch  _anything_  of mine when I can’t even trust you with  _me_?” he asked, his voice getting high again, but this time it broke on the last word.

“I'm--” Roadhog stopped and Junkrat wished he could see his stupid face fumbling over the words.  What could he possibly have to say?  Junkrat didn’t want him to say anything.  Just silently fuck off and never show his dumb pig-mask-face-whatever ever again.

“I’m sorry,” Roadhog said.

“You’re  _sorry_?!”

Roadhog’s chest expanded with a long, deep inhale and it just pissed Junkrat off all the more.

“You’re  _fucking sorry_?!”

“ _Yes_!”  Roadhog’s voice boomed across the desert and echoed against the towering piles of scrap behind them.  Junkrat’s ears rang with it, and he couldn’t hear what Roadhog said after, but it was probably a bunch of shit.

“Yeah?” Junkrat asked.  “Sorry?  Really? Because you knew you were going to fucking  _hand me over to those shit bags_ , so I mean, it makes perfect sense for me to fucking trust you when you say you’re, ‘ _sorry_!’ ” he shrieked, making sure to add exaggerated, one handed air quotes.

Roadhog was silent.  Too silent, and Junkrat figured that he was either going to smash his skull into the half formed chassis or they were going to sit there in silence until the dingos came for them.

Instead, Roadhog stood up and walked back toward the bike, just like Junkrat had wanted him to.  Away from him.  

“Yeah, that’s right,” he called after Roadhog, dragging his sidecar back toward him and picking up right where he’d left off.  “Walk away, mate.  That’s all that you’re good for.”

That felt good.  It was a good parting stab.  He could only hope it scratched the surface a little.  There was no chance of him actually fucking hurting the bastard. He hadn’t even goddamned paused when Junkrat put that fucking spork in his windpipe.

Junkrat had expected to be ripped apart, or his nose rebroken.  Something.  Anything.

Anything but fucking _silence_.  Anything but a  _meaningless apology_.

The sidecar came together slower than before, his mojo ruined by Roadhog one second and then inspired by it the next.  High and low, fast and slow. He worked on getting the stupid thing together and up on wheels before nightfall, because there was no way in hell he was going to ride on the bike with Roadhog.

That was the one thing he was sure of.  

If he had to ride  _with_  Roadhog, the stupid oaf was going to find something sharp in his kidney.  And he really believed that Junkrat wouldn't do it.  

He  _“trusted” him_.

Fuck Roadhog.

Fuck his trust.  Junkrat was going to blow him up the first chance he got.  

Once the sidecar was done-- just a metal sphere with wheels under it and a hitch at the side that would  _probably_  fit where the other car had connected.  If it didn’t, he could fuck with it, but he was just glad to have  _something_  to keep Roadhog off his back and prevent him from having to ride bitch behind him.

The rattle of chains preceded Roadhog, and Junkrat popped his head up over the side of the car.  He sneered and sunk back down into the sidecar as soon as he saw what was in Roadhog’s hand.  He regretted not secreting away a sharp bit of metal and wrapped his hand around the grenade in his pocket, ready to detonate it right here and now if it kept those fucking cuffs off of him.

Roadhog must have seen the change, because he stopped moving and his hand-- poorly wrapped in a bloody bandage-- tightened around the cuffs until they bent.

Shit.  Shit, his skull was going to get broken all over his shitty new sidecar, and his grenade probably didn’t have enough power to stop shit--

Roadhog hauled back and threw the cuffs, which ground Junkrat’s gears to a halt.

They clanged against the metal in the scrap yard, then they fell and hit something else, then another five things before they stopped somewhere, and soon the echoes of them died.

“Don't go off and kill yourself, Rat,” was all Roadhog said in explanation.

Junkrat’s hand relaxed around his grenade, and he felt something other than the pain and anger.  Something warm that he hadn’t felt often enough to give a name.

"...Uh. Nah, mate. No plans on dyin' today," Junkrat said, still trying to figure out what was going on inside his chest as he sat back and pulled the grenade out, keeping it hidden below the lip of the car.

“Good.  Let’s get moving,” Roadhog grunted, turning his back on Junkrat and heading toward the hog.

Junkrat had his chance.  This was it, he could fuck up Roadhog, take the bike, be free, rely on only himself again… he slipped the grenade back into his pocket and sat back in the hard, uncomfortable side car.  It was going to be a shitty ride back.

Together.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll update this chapter with art when it's done! We're both pretty busy with life right now, and felt bad for not updating for a while so here's just the fic with art soon to come!

The trip back to their base camp was so quiet and eventless that it was eerie.  Roadhog kept his eyes on the horizon in as many directions as he could manage, but there was nothing there.  Aside from the burning corpses behind them, they were alone.  Alone and safe, even if it was only for a moment.

As soon as Roadhog pulled up to the repurposed school, Junkrat jumped out and put distance between them, hobbling along on the crutch Roadhog had given him.

Roadhog tried to ignore him, tried not to think about how bloody dramatic he was being.  He disconnected the sidecar full of parts and carefully wheeled it into the gym.  An annoyed “ _ mine _ ” came from behind as Junkrat followed him in.  Roadhog just rolled his eyes and let the sidecar come to a rest beside Junkrat’s cot.

“This good?” Roadhog asked.

“Sure,” Junkrat replied, distractedly picking through the turret parts a few yards away.

Roadhog grunted in reply, surprised that he hadn't been a prick and noticing that he wasn't really looking at the parts, just moving them around distractedly again.

Worry curled in the center of Roadhog’s chest like a death adder, silent, deadly and just barely perceptible through the bush of all the other shit he had to deal with.

Junkrat suddenly sat up straight from hunching over the pile and craned around to look at Roadhog, his lips drawing back and his nose wrinkling in a way that seemed extremely put upon.  “Be better if you weren't here,” Junkrat added belatedly.

Roadhog grunted again and shrugged before walking out to unpack the bike.  That was a little better.  Something was still off.

Roadhog was so intent on ignoring how squirrelly Junkrat was being that it took him two hours to notice that he wasn't just not going near the sidecar, he was actively avoiding it, giving it a wide berth if he needed to get something on the other side of it.

“You drag all that shit back with us just to let it rot?” Roadhog asked, watching Junkrat picking through supply boxes across the gym instead of the parts he’d whined and bitched about needing so badly.

“Fuck off,” Junkrat said absently.  His reedy voice echoed against the high ceiling.  It was stronger and with less of a crack in it than Roadhog had heard in a long time.  Since the handoff, really, which felt like it was both years ago and last week.

Roadhog snorted in response and tried to shake off the sudden pang of guilt by grabbing a pack of food and a bottle of water.  “Take a break from digging ‘round.”

“Take a break from being shit--oh, right, you can't,” Junkrat said, sneering down at the pack of ointment in his hand.  Roadhog just stood there with the food and water until Junkrat looked up.

Several emotions crossed his face before he snatched the package of food away and began ripping it open.  Roadhog knelt down to set the canteen next to him and tried to ignore how obvious Junkrat was about watching him in the corner of his eye as Roadhog moved closer and then away again.

Junkrat ate quickly and then got back to work on his part picking.  He was more focused, but didn't go near the sidecar of parts until Roadhog moved it over to where he was.

Maybe he was just being a fucking prick.

Sure enough, once the sidecar was moved closer to him, Junkrat started digging out parts from it like he hadn't just ignored it for half the day.

Wishy washy idiot.

Junkrat didn't get all of his parts out and sorted before dark, but that didn't prevent him from sleeping in the side car.  Roadhog watched him curl up amongst the hard and jagged metal pieces and wondered what the fuck his problem was as he himself fell asleep.

He felt nervous with Junkrat loose. He was still so agitated that Roadhog couldn't even begin to predict his moves.  Sometimes he was giggling, happy even, talking like they were right back where they started.  Other times, he made stabs at Roadhog for handing him over, for being a “lying sack of dingo shit” and for coming back at all.  Junkrat kept telling him it would have been better to die than to have to look at Roadhog’s shitty traitor mask all the time.

Roadhog tried to keep a careful eye on Junkrat while appearing like he wasn't.  It was difficult when Junkrat had a sense for where Roadhog’s eyes were even if he couldn't see them.  It was uncanny.

He slept across the gym from Junkrat, but something told him it was still too close.  Even if it wasn't, Junkrat still didn't want to sleep.  He gave Roadhog every excuse--he didn't want to sleep in the same room as a traitor; he wasn't tired; Roadhog’s breathing was too noisy; it was too quiet in the gym.

Roadhog just wanted him to stop being a whiny cunt and go to sleep.

Junkrat wouldn't go near the old bolted down bed against the wall. Roadhog got so frustrated with him that he had thrown the mattress at him in a fit of annoyance, but Junkrat had made the best of it.  He converted his sidecar into a very shitty bed using the mattress from the standard issue cot.  Roadhog would use the term “bed” very loosely because there was no way anyone could sleep at such an awkward angle, and Junkrat  _ still _ didn't really sleep.  His eyes closed for a few seconds, just long enough that it wasn't a blink, and then he would open them again right when Roadhog thought he was finally going to doze off.

It was unhealthy and worrisome, but the leg was coming together, with spit and mumbled curses and plenty of dubious engineering.

Junkrat hadn't stabbed Roadhog in four days or somehow cobbled together an explosive and blown him up.  

It was enough that Roadhog thought he could take his time checking their perimeter.  He walked every inch of the fence instead of just glancing in the general direction and past it.  He buried a few mines under the shittier sections where some dumbass junker might think they could get through, and reworked the panels that had holes rusted or shot into them.  

He picked up any spare scrap that was littered around the old school and discovered a few solar panels that had fallen off of the roof.  One of them was still whole.  Roadhog was pretty sure he could get it up and working.  Not because he cared about having real lights in the gym, but because sitting and watching Junkrat slap together his stupid leg got more painful every day.  He needed a distraction.

Roadhog scratched the back of his neck, just beneath the strap of his mask and stared at the door.  He didn't know how long it would last, how long he could keep alert for every spork and sharp piece of metal.  Someday, Junkrat would get the last shiv in and Roadhog wouldn’t be quick enough to get a can of hogdrogen in.  

And he would deserve it.

The top of the bent door stuck when he went to open it and Roadhog had to wrench it open harder than usual.  He didn't realize the top bolt had been locked until it dropped out of the socket and hit him in the head.

Junkrat was grinning at him when Roadhog sighed and rubbed his head.  The shitheel had tried to lock him out.

“Cute,” he grunted before his eyes dropped from Junkrat’s shit eating grin to his fingers nimbly buckling up the leather straps on his new leg.  

“Finally finished ‘er.  A beaut, huh? Better than the old one,” he said, standing up and testing his balance before bending over and adjusting the straps tighter before squatting and testing the joint.  It moved smoothly and didn't hitch just before going straight on the way up.  “Knee’s less janky.”

Roadhog grunted and turned away to dig dinner out of the ration box.  He saw a flash of yellow foam where black should have been and stopped mid-step.  Junkrat was cackling behind him.

“Couldn't find any good strap material in the boxes.”

His bike seat was gone.

“You’d figure two shit-for-brains twinks would be more into leather goods, but  _ nooooo _ course that would be the only goddamned thing they  _ don't _ have.”

It was stripped down to the foam and metal.

“Useless pieces of shit, right?”

There was a pocket knife lying in the dust beside the bike, some scissors and what looked like trimmings.

“Right?” Junkrat was standing directly behind him.

Roadhog tightened his right fist until the knuckles cracked.

That was the last thing Junkrat needed to start laughing, and that laughter was the last thing Roadhog needed to want to punch his lights out.

He whirled on the stupid little shit gobbler and went to grab him by his harness out of habit, but his knuckles just grazed Junkrat’s chest.  Junkrat, still laughing like a loon, jumped back, his left arm flailed out for balance and Roadhog grabbed it and dragged him in, his fist missed the first swing, but he drew back again, ready to pummel the smirk off of Junkrat’s stupid, narrow piece of shit face.

“Like it, then?” Junkrat asked, his eyes bright and his grin stretching impossibly wide across his face. He was grinning so widely that his split lip had started to bleed again.

He was grinning so widely that it reminded Roadhog of a drugged up bruised piece of shit hanging from the ceiling of a basement.

Roadhog suddenly felt everything drain out of him, and he just felt tired.  

Junkrat’s grin began to deflate when Roadhog’s fist dropped, and his brows slowly drifted down to furrow when he was let go.

"Yeah, 's a real piece of work," Roadhog said belatedly, taking a few steps back and then turning away, walking closer to his bike so that he could survey the damage.  

Junkrat made a strangled, high pitched noise behind him, then he felt the familiar slap of Junkrat’s stump against his back.  “Punch me, you piece of shit!” He snapped.  “Punch me real good! C’mon!”

Roadhog took a deep breath and cracked his neck.

Junkrat let out a giggle and hit him with his stump again.

Roadhog whipped around and grabbed Junkrat by his throat, shoving him back until he was pinned to the graffitied wall above his bed.  Junkrat was still giggling. His left hand slapped against Roadhog’s mask and shoulder, but it felt half hearted.  This was what he wanted.  Roadhog started ripping at the buckles on Junkrat’s leg, pulling the stolen leather loose of the buckles and taking a lot of satisfaction from the fact that Junkrat’s slaps were coming harder and his giggling had changed into choking and high pitched cursing as soon as he realized Roadhog was taking his leg.

“Fuck you!” Junkrat screeched. “I just fucking finished that! It’s mine!  _ Mine!  _ Don't you fucking  _ dare take this from me! _ ”  Junkrat shrieked, slapping Roadhog harder and harder, clawing him and kicking at him with both legs until the new prosthetic twisted off and fell to the floor.  Then he only had to worry about the newly unburdened thigh that always had just enough length and leverage to nearly nail Roadhog in the jewels.

It finally connected and Roadhog flinched, his hand releasing Junkrat.  Before he could scramble to get his leg, Roadhog kicked the prosthetic away and grabbed Junkrat by his waist.  He pushed Junkrat into the bare metal bed and leaned in close, let Junkrat headbutt him until he was seeing stars and Junkrat looked dazed.

“What,” Roadhog asked between labored breaths, “is the point of me saving you if you just keep trying to get yourself killed?”

Junkrat laughed and spit bloody saliva at his mask, hitting him right in the lense.  “What’s the point in you saving me if you're just going to keep me locked up forever?” Junkrat replied, his face twisted in a sneer, bloody teeth bared.  “What was the point in selling me? Get your rocks off on being a white knight?”

Roadhog didn't answer.  Mostly because he didn't really have a good answer for himself, but also because Junkrat was just trying to bait him again, and Roadhog working him over was what he wanted.  Instead, he braced his hand on Junkrat’s chest, felt his bones creak beneath his palm and the cunt wheezed as Roadhog pushed away and got up off the bed.

He didn't feel like a white knight as he collected Junkrat’s leg and tried to ignore the spitting and shouting behind him.

"Give it back! I  _ made that  _ you can't keep fucking doing this!"

Roadhog didn't feel like a white knight as he slammed the emergency door behind him and tossed the leg with its stupid stolen straps into the dust next to the desecrated hog.  He felt like a piece of shit trying to make right and constantly failing at it because he'd done something that he probably couldn't be forgiven for.  The reason he did it was a tangle of emotion that he didn’t want to even acknowledge, much less sort  through and make good with.

He looked at the seat again and surveyed the damage more closely.  Junkrat had been thorough in his skinning, which meant that he hadn't just hacked the damn thing to bits, which was nice, but he was probably trying to preserve the integrity of the leather, not Roadhog’s baby.

There's material in some of the crates.  if he looks hard enough he might actually be able to find leather, but that would mean being in the same room as Junkrat again.

His hands are still trembling and he’s not sure if he's ready to be in the same space without killing him.  He only  _ just _ managed not to.  It would be no hard feat to break Junkrat in two.

He could hear giggling replacing the raging inside.  Junkrat knew he was looking at the bike.

Roadhog took a deep breath and sighed it out slowly.  Reacting how he wanted would only make it worse.   

Roadhog took a strip of measuring tape from his pouch and started taking dimensions for a new seat. 

After a while of taking measurements and forgetting to write them down the first time, Roadhog realized that Junkrat’s giggling in the gym had gone silent.

He took a deep breath before opening the door and walking in.  Junkrat had dragged himself back to his pile of parts and looked like he was working on the bones of a launcher.

Of course a weapon would be more important than an arm.  Especially now that he wanted to kill Roadhog even more.

Roadhog went deeper into the gym and started looking through boxes for leather, or anything that might be a comfortable substitute until he could get some genuine cowhide again.

Junkrat mumbled to himself, and metal clanked against the high, empty ceiling, but the two men kept to themselves.


	15. Chapter 15

Junkrat was pissed.  He'd been pissed for nearly an hour.

“Give me my leg back,” he demanded, his voice rough from repeating the phrase every ten minutes, and from the tantrums that followed when Roadhog ignored him and continued looking through boxes.

A high whine built in the back of Junkrat’s throat.  It cracked and warbled until he let it out in a vicious scream.  “GIVE ME MY FUCKING LEG BACK!”

Junkrat saw Roadhog’s head swing around, a sign he _did_  have the shitheel’s attention.  Though Junkrat didn't quite stop thrashing, he gave Roadhog his attention anyway. Just in case.

“ _No_.”

Junkrat threw the insides of his launcher he had been working on at Roadhog and immediately regretted it, because it didn't hit Roadhog and as soon as it smashed into the floor, hours of finicky, one handed work scattered across the room.

“Fuck!” Junkrat hit the side car, then hit it again and again until a massive hand dragged him back, and he started whaling on Roadhog.

He felt satisfaction when he saw red left behind on Roadhog’s chest and mask, but it flitted away as soon as he realized that it was his own bleeding knuckles.

“Let me go, y’big shitbag!” He snapped, shoving at Roadhog with his bleeding hand and his stump.  He was set down.  Roadhog didn't drop him or fucking let him flop onto the hard wood like a fuckin fish just pulled out of water.  He fucking set him down and it was worse.  So much worse.

Roadhog walked away, leaving Junkrat with his thoughts.  He’d fucked up Roadhog’s seat and barely gotten a tap for it.  He’d been a total twat about his leg and Roadhog hadn't told him to shut up.  Not once.

He was so fucking pissed.

Junkrat punched the sidecar again, able to feel it that time.  He hissed and brought his knuckles up to his mouth.

Roadhog came back with the first aid kit.  Junkrat wanted to scream.

“Fuck off,” he hissed instead, snatching the bandages from Roadhog and scooting away from him to do the damn job himself.

It was difficult, but with his teeth, dexterous fingers and a junker’s stubbornness, Junkrat got his hand bandaged and curled up in his side car.

Roadhog had started leaving the gym when Junkrat got amped up, and when Junkra peeked over the side of the car, he was already halfway to the door. Junkrat didn’t know where he went, but it was a sweet relief because that meant that Junkrat could work on the couple of explosives he had tucked away in the lining of his side car instead of only working on them when he was curled up fading between asleep and awake.

He had a new plan.  He still had the crutch.  It made it easier to get to the emergency door and shove it open.  It was bent horribly and screamed as it was opened, but Junkrat ignored the noise.  Roadhog hadn't coming running any of the other times he had shoved the door open.

First, he found his leg tucked away in one of the saddle bags.  Then, he ripped the fuel line out.  Gas soaked into the cracks of the dust beaten concrete beneath the bike and he filled a canteen with it for later use. Just fucking up the fuel line wasn't enough, so he grabbed a handful of wires and pulled, leaving them hanging frayed and pathetic over the frame.

Perfect.  Fuck Roadhog.  He leaned against the bare seat to put his leg back on and considered taking a dump on the bare foam, but it would take too long.

Once he had his leg on, Junkrat patted his bombs in progress in his pocket and then started walking toward the front of the enclosure.

Poorly hidden landmines were easy to avoid, though Junkrat almost set off a wire trap.

Once he was out of the fence, Junkrat started hoofing it east.  There was less likely to be more of Kangaboom and Bangaroo’s goons, and Roadhog would probably expect him to head farther into the bush instead of out of if.

He got two meters before he heard a muffled, gruff, “God _fucking_ damn it!”

Well, that was quick.

Junkrat kept walking, even after he heard the rattle of chain.  Roadhog was coming after him.  He tensed for the hook, but when it never came, he turned to look behind him.

Roadhog was _walking_ after him.  His hook was still holstered.  He wasn't even doing the resigned stalk that he did when he was pissed off.

Junkrat stopped and crossed his arms.  Maybe Roadhog had finally decided to kill him.  He would prefer it to just being kept around like a weird pet.

Roadhog stopped in front of him and they stared at each other until the silence made Junkrat twitchy.

“Why the fuck haven't you killed me yet?” he asked, throwing his arms wide.

Roadhog just grabbed his left arm and started dragging him back toward the school.  Junkrat dug his heel in and tried to angle his new prosthetic to get purchase, but he just kept moving.  Junkrat fought Roadhog every inch of the way until they made it back to the gym and Roadhog shoved him at the bike.

“Fix the bike,” he said, and he didn't even sound mad.  He just sounded like Junkrat was starting to bore him.

He had intentionally, _with great fucking purpose_ , broken Roadhog’s bike.   _Again_.  He had stripped the seat and pulled a bunch of shit loose and yet he was still alive.

Roadhog hadn't even liked Junkrat _touching_ his hog before.

Roadhog stared at him real hard, like he was making sure he wasn't going to dart off again, then turned away.  Left him to it.

No _or else_.

No clock over the head.

He hadn't hooked Junkrat.  He didn't have anger rolling off of him like dust clouds on an outback road.

Nothing.

There were hundreds of times that Junkrat had said something stupid and Roadhog had smacked him in the back of the head.  Dozens where he had touched the bike and Roadhog had threatened to help him lose his other arm.  A handful where they ended up tussling in the dirt, kicking and punching and biting because Roadhog was a mean tempered lout and Junkrat didn't know when to stop pushing--and when he did know, he just didn't give a fuck.

The whole pacifist Roadhog was just… wrong.

Why was he acting like that?

His _bike_ was involved.

Junkrat should be _dead._

Junkrat raised his foot and gave the hog a firm kick.  It creaked, then the bike started to tilt, then it flopped over on its side.

He would show Roadhog _fixing_ the bike.

He had started to take the bike apart more thoroughly when a thought occurred to him.  It just appeared out of thin air, unwanted and unneeded.

Maybe Roadhog _was_ sorry.

Junkrat scoffed and went back to taking the stupid bike apart.  Served him right for leaving Junkrat alone with it.

_But_ …

Junkrat’s hand paused in the middle of loosening the engine from the frame.

No.   _No._ There was no way.  

Roadhog didn't apologize.  He didn't regret things.  He didn't _change_ ; Junkrat certainly knew that.  Being around Junkrat for a year hadn't softened him, and when Junkrat had started flirting a bit in the end, well…

Roadhog had reacted the same way he did to any of Junkrat’s long winded tangents—silently waited until Junkrat was done and then they moved on.

A pang deep in Junkrat’s chest made his hand shake, and he paused what he was doing to try and figure out what the fuck was going on.  

No.  Nonononono, he did _not_ still give a shit and a half about Roadhog and how he obviously didn't feel the same way.  He _didn't care_.  Roadhog was outside of the things that Junkrat allowed himself to care about after the stunt he pulled.

Junkrat _hated Roadhog._

But the ache was still there.

“Rack off,” Junkrat sneered at himself as he began to fix the bike one handed.  He heard Roadhog grunt and turned to see him standing from where he was sitting eating a ration.

Fuck, when had he come back?  Junkrat was so used to being hyperaware of Roadhog ever since he—what? Rescued him? Brought him back?— got him out of Junkertown that the fact that he didn’t hear the heavy tread of Roadhog’s boots concerned him more than the fact that Roadhog had been watching him deliberately take the bike further apart and hadn’t said anything.

When Roadhog noticed he had Junkrat’s attention, he stared back. His blank, emotionless mask gave away nothing, but his fists weren’t clenched and his shoulders weren’t tense like he was trying to convince himself that Junkrat’s treasure was worth keeping him around.  He seemed almost relaxed, but then Junkrat saw it: he slight bow to his broad shoulders; he way he held his head, like he was uncomfortable with the way Junkrat was looking at him.

The tickle of thought came back.  The little bit from his tangent that he knew had to be wrong.

Roadhog couldn’t be sorry.  That would mean he regretted what he’d done. That would mean he’d changed.  He’d developed—  Developed what? A conscience?  Morals?

Junkrat snorted and turned back to the bike.  The moment was broken.  No.  Roadhog didn’t change. What you saw was what you got. That was what made sense. That's what has always _made sense_ for so long.

He was too big and tough and old to change and Junkrat knew that.  Knew it when he started feeling that swimmy feeling in his gut every time Roadhog smacked him upside the head for doing something dumb— not the kind that rattled his head, but the kind that was nearly sweet.  He knew it deep in his bones that Roadhog wasn’t made to care— not the way Junkrat wanted— but he had told himself that maybe, just maybe, he could be the one to change him.  They seemed closer, right?  Seemed like maybe he cared just a little bit there at the end.

Junkrat sniffed.  He was too dehydrated to cry so his eyes just ached.  Fuck Roadhog.  He could stay his shitty old bastard of a self.  If surviving Straya for that long meant staying the same and pushing people away, maybe he had a bead on doing it right in the wastes.  Maybe that was why Junkrat needed a bodyguard—to remind him to stay the course, never trust anyone and always have your partner enter buildings first.  A wicked sneer pulled at his chapped lips.  

“You done yet?” Roadhog asked.

Junkrat jumped at the proximity, but forced himself not to turn around.  “Almost,” Junkrat replied, trying to remember where the fuck he was in fixing the stupid piece of shit.  His hands had moved without him as he got lost in thought, and the bike looked more like it should but there were still pieces by his knee and he wasn’t really sure where they had come from.  He shuffled them into the dirt and hoped Roadhog didn’t notice.  “Think I’m done, actually.”

“Good.”  Roadhog reached down and dragged the hog back up onto its two wheels before setting the stand and dusting off the bare foam of the seat.  “Go get your side car.  We’re going to a scrap yard.”

They packed rations for a week and all of their tools into the sidecar and the hog’s saddle bags.  It felt oddly comforting to have the metal corner of the toolbox digging into his ass and a rolled up bundle of machine parts between his legs.  He was definitely sure he would need them in addition to whatever they found in the scrap yard.  Kind of.  Mostly.

Anyway, they were his parts and he wasn’t leaving without them.  Who knew if they were coming back, he told Roadhog.

He wasn’t planning on it.

All he needed was to get to a better place with better scrap.  Then, he would be in good shape to rebuild everything and fuck off alone.  It all hinged on whether Roadhog would make it easy or hard.

There was a bomb and two unfinished halves hidden in the lining of the sidecar.  He wasn’t sure if he was hoping or dreading using them on Roadhog.

What if the first one didn’t take him down?  He would probably find retribution in smashing Junkrat’s new prosthetic leg to pieces or ripping his remaining flesh one off and shoving it down his throat.

As they bumped along through the dusty tracks, Junkrat chewed on his cuticles and tried to prepare himself for what he had to do.  As soon as they got to the scrap yard and Junkrat had what he needed, he was going to escape for the last time.  One way or another, he was tired of feeling trapped.

Roadhog stopped the bike a click away from the wide swathe of metal and rust.  There were massive metal plates set up to flank the road, staggered all the way along it like uneven ribs lining a twisting spine.  Some of them had corrugated omnisteel leaning against them or propped up on stilts to make pseudo shelters.  Maybe it was for guards in another life, but right then, it was destitute and abandoned. Roadhog made sure that the bike was partially behind one of the massive plates set in the ground before getting out and digging a pair of rebuilt binoculars from one of the saddle bags.  Junkrat struggled out of the sidecar as Roadhog scoped out the place.  Every joint Junkrat had popped when he stretched, then he limped over to take a piss while Roadhog did his bullshit bodyguard routine.  Check the entrances and exits, peer at the shadows, make sure that there weren’t any junker vehicles visible.

“I think it’s clear,” Roadhog said, just as Junkrat was getting so bored he started considering digging his bombs out of the sidecar and fiddling with them behind Roadhog’s back.  They weren’t even on the right side of the metal plate for shade, what use was this?  “Let’s walk.”

Junkrat huffed and hopped back into the side car.  “Up yours,” he said.  “Not leaving my parts or my food anywhere.”  While Roadhog was still about ten strides away, he carefully and quickly worked his single finished bomb out of the sidecar and into his pocket.

“We’ll come back,” Roadhog told him.  There wasn’t a sign of annoyance in his voice.  He didn’t sound angry or argumentative.  It was like he was just stating a fact instead of trying to force Junkrat to get out and go.

If he had demanded Junkrat go with him, he would have.  He would have huffed and groaned and hemmed and hawed and then _fine_.  He would _w_ _alk_ to the junkyard.  This borderline nice shit, though? _Fuck_ that.  Junkrat wanted to blow him up right then and there.

“Fucking make me, you piggy prick,” Junkrat snapped.  The bomb was already in his pocket.  All he had to do was chuck it and there was a good chance he would be rid of Roadhog forever.  He could jump on the bike and ride off into the sunset.  All alone and free of the asshole who kept hovering and bitching and acting _wrong_.

Roadhog sighed and cracked his neck.  Something shiny in the distance caught Junkrat’s eye and his gaze flickered from Roadhog to one of the towering piles of cars.  He leaned forward and backward trying to get a better angle.  What was that?

“Junkrat--”

Distracted, Junkrat barely registered his name before a loud crack echoed across the outback.  It echoed loudly against the metal plate.  Junkrat felt a nervous jerk in his stomach at the suddenness.  Roadhog flinched and then he ducked down and hurried behind a metal plate.  Dust puffed up a hundred meters behind Junkrat.  That was meant for him. If he hadn’t been moving to try and see better, he would be dead.

“So much for it being ‘clear,’ hog breath!”  Junkrat yelled, trying to ignore the spike of panic surging through him  Another bullet pinged off of the sidecar and Junkrat bailed out, tucking himself closer against the metal plate and trying to come up with a plan.  He needed a plan.  Plan.   _Plan_.

“You good?” Roadhog called.

Junkrat stayed silent and glared around the opposite edge of the plate.  Fuck Roadhog, he could think Junkrat was dead for all he cared.

“Rat!”  Roadhog snapped, and it was the first time he’d sounded pissed in the short time frame Junkrat could readily remember.  Good.  “Shit…”

Junkrat saw the flash again and zeroed in on it.  If Roadhog could get close enough he could probably unsettle the tower and bring the shooter down.  Christ, Junkrat hated snipers.  They kept their distance, they never played fair.  It wasn’t a good scrap, it was just _crack_.   _Dead_.

He walked back over to the bike and was working up the gumption to call out to Roadhog, tell him his plan, when he saw the asshole trying to dart across the opening back to the bike.

Junkrat felt his heart stop when he realized that Roadhog was too slow, he was running in a straight line, he was _being stupid_.  Junkrat had enough time to take a single step forward and open his mouth before another shot rang out.

Dust didn’t puff from a missed shot.  The force of it sent Roadhog staggering to his knees and Junkrat felt every nerve in him suddenly start screaming.  Roadhog shifted like he was about to get up, but then _crack!_ he lurched from the force of the second shot and fell forward.  Junkrat wasn’t in control of what happened next, because instead of just hopping on the bike and zig zagging the fuck away, Junkrat skidded to a stop beside Roadhog and jabbed his left hand into his pocket for a can of hogdrogen.  

It slipped out of his hand and Junkrat knew he was out of time.  He dove out of the way as another shot rang out.  Dust puffed scarcely half a meter from Roadhog’s prone body and Junkrat rolled behind the nearest thick metal panel.  He took several deep breaths and tried to convince himself to go.  He had to leave.  There was a sniper and he only had one hand and even if he had a working grenade launcher or any other fucking junker weapon he still wouldn’t be able to do jack shit against this sniper.

Junkrat slammed his fist into the wooden support with a snarl.  “Move you massive piece of shit!” he yelled at Roadhog.  The support creaked and then fell over, dropping a heavy sheet of corrugated omnisteel on top of Junkrat.  “Fuck!” He felt a sharp, burning pain in his right shoulder, but he shrugged it off.  The tickle of blood ran down his side and pooled wet and tacky in the waist of his shorts.

He pushed it to the back of his mind and grabbed the edge of the panel, his mind was moving; _Roadhog wasn’t_.  His heart was pounding; _Roadhog--_ " _Get the fuck up you sack'a shit_ ,” he shrieked as he lost his train of thought.  Roadhog couldn’t be--  “I swear on _me nan's rotting tits_ if you die right now I'll use your stupid pig gob as a bloody pissbag _get the fuck up_."

Roadhog stayed down.

Junkrat trembled so hard he couldn’t tell if Roadhog was still breathing.  He took several deep breaths and focused on the plan.  The plan.  Not Roadhog’s massive, stupid, _deathly still_ \-- the plan.  He looked at the sheet of metal and then turned his focus to the distance between him and Roadhog.  This was going to take all of his strength, and he had to move quickly.  He took a deep breath and then stuck his head out from behind the metal plate protecting him.  He saw the scope bobbing on top of the tower.

He jerked back when the flashing looked like it was just about steadied.

_Crack_.

Dust showered him as he moved forward, using the sound of the rifle as his signal to surge forward.  He dragged the metal panel with him and struggled across the short distance to Roadhog.  He cursed when he realized he was on the wrong side and glanced up to see the scope flashing again, trying to steady itself before it took another shot.

Junkrat braced his foot and peg leg on Roadhog’s arm and hauled the panel up and over his bodyguard.  It clanged as it hit the ground on the other side of Roadhog, then it slipped, but didn’t go all the way down, instead settling against his bulk and providing some shelter from the sniper fire while Junkrat wrenched Roadhog’s face to the side.  He couldn’t tell if Roadhog was breathing.  Junkrat’s fingers slipped on the hogdrogen canister again, but this time it was because it was streaked with blood.  Fuck, there was a lot of it pooling on the ground under Roadhog’s face and neck.

Junkrat finally got a decent handle on the can and shoved it into Roadhog’s mask as another crack rang out.   The force of it rocked Roadhog’s body and the plate slipped again.  The shitbag had shot right into the omnisteel panel.  

“Get up!”  Junkrat punched Roadhog’s shoulder and engaged the hogdrogen canister again and again.

_Crack_.

“Roadie!” Junkrat shoved the can into the mask two more times before he finally heard the hiss of Roadhog taking a hit.  “Yeah,” he said, softly even though his heart was hammering out of his chest and he was trembling all over.  “Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, keep breathing big guy, aces.  Take some more…”

The hiss started again when Roadhog took in another breath.

Junkrat felt relief prick at his throat and the backs of his eyes and he waited for Roadhog to take a big breath before disengaging the can and digging another one out.  He shoved it into Roadhog’s mask and patted his massive shoulder, already colored with Junkrat’s bloody handprints.  

Now that Roadhog wasn’t in immediate danger, Junkrat felt his anger spark again.  “If you’re breathing you can fucking move!” he snapped, but Roadhog didn’t fucking move.  He lay there, taking slow, short breaths.

The next rifle crack dragged Junkrat back from bitching at Roadhog.  He scampered around Roadhog to dart behind one of the plates that was closer to the chain link and barbed wire of the scrap yard.  He waited half a second before jerking forward and listening to the steady _crack_ , pause to reload, _crack_ of the sniper trying to pin him down.  Just as he got behind cover, he was out again, not letting the asshole get a good fix on where his head would be when he darted back out.

Junkrat finally stopped when he had covered about half the distance to the scrap yard.  Fuck, this was further than he had thought.  He heard the ping of another rifle bullet on the metal protecting Roadhog and felt his stomach clench.  

They were trying to draw Junkrat back out.  

Junkrat glanced over the top of the metal plate while the sniper reloaded.

Fuck, it was a long one, but…

Junkrat fished the bomb out of his pocket and weighed it in his palm.  He made allowances in his mind and figured the angle by imagining it.  If he banked it off of the body of the old crane, he would be able to get the bottom of the tower.

He took a deep breath, set the timer, then took another breath.  He let the breath out slowly, waiting until the next sharp _crack_ before ducking out from behind the metal plate and whipping the grenade at the crane.  

If he had had his right arm back, he would have made it.  The bomb would have bounced off of the crane and taken out the tower in a screaming jumble of old cars and scrap.  If he had his right arm.  All he had was his left, though, and the bomb fell short.  It missed the crane by about a meter.

Junkrat cursed and a sniper bullet hit his shoulder, staggering him.  The next one would probably be in his head--

The explosion went off beneath the crane.

In a spectacular show of screeching metal and flames, the crane was blasted from below and the left side of it jerked up nearly a meter.  The heavy chains attached to the top of the extended neck swung drastically to the side and it toddled like it wasn’t sure if it wanted to settle or creak over.

Junkrat dove for cover with a high, relieved laugh.  The crane groaned and creaked and then started to fall, and Junkrat heard a shout that didn’t belong to him or Roadhog.

He trembled as he stood and shook his stump to get the accumulating blood off, then started walking toward the scrap yard.  The excitement of not getting a bullet through his skull was all too soon replaced with unsuppressable rage.

Cars and scrap had crushed the fence and gate.  Junkrat climbed over them, trying to judge where the sniper would have fallen.  He found the rifle.  Its barrel was bent, its stock was shattered and there was blood on the ground.

Junkrat picked up the broken gun and cleared the chamber before following the trail of blood.

He hated traps.

He hated snipers.

When he found the sniper crouched in one of the buildings fumbling with a first aid kit, he didn’t hesitate to bring the splintered stock down on the back of her head.

He slammed the gun down again and again.  The more blood that splattered, the more anger he felt, and the more he remembered.  The basement in Junkertown.  Roadhog dying.  He could have let him die then, but he shoved the canister in.

He could have let him die a few minutes ago, but he didn’t.

All Junkrat could see was red and pink and skull, but he didn’t stop swinging.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can thank Thyme-basalt for Roadhog getting shot twice. Go ahead, I'll wait.


End file.
